Tokyo - Hitachi Ltd said Friday that it expected a record loss of 700 billion yen (7.78 billion dollars) for the current fiscal year on sluggish demand for semiconductors, car devices and digital products and announced thousands of job cuts.

The Japanese electronics company had previously forecast profit of 15 billion yen for the year that ends March 31.

Hitachi also cut its sales projection by 8.1 per cent to 10.02 trillion yen for the year while it said it expected operating profit of 40 billion yen, which was also revised downward from 410 billion yen.

The company also announced a plan to cut about 4,000 employees worldwide in its automotive systems operations, and it said it also expected to cut or transfer an additional 3,000 workers on a global basis in its flat-panel-television and other consumer-electronics operations.

For its third quarter, Hitachi reported a net loss of 371 billion yen and an operating loss of 15 billion yen on sales of 2.26 trillion yen.

For the same quarter a year before, Hitachi had logged a net profit of 12.5 billion yen, operating profit of 77.87 billion yen and sales of 2.71 trillion yen. (dpa)