Report: Panasonic may post an historic loss Wednesday

The press service AFP this morning is citing reports in the Asian press as stating that Panasonic will report an operating loss this past quarter of ¥350 billion (about $3.9 billion USD) on Wednesday, partly due to the bad economy and partly to its ongoing acquisition of Sanyo. This would be the first quarterly loss for the former Matsushita in about seven years.

However, the exact source of the AFP's news this morning is uncertain. In what could be a possible rewrite error, the name of the newspaper ("Shimbun") was attributed by the AFP to two different cities. The Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun are two different sources entirely, and the Web sites for neither paper are carrying any such news this morning.