Tokyo Electric, Toshiba, East Japan Rail May Be Among Most Hurt by Quake

[avaistheone1]

Source: Bloomberg

Tokyo Electric Power Co., Toshiba Corp., East Japan Railway Co. and Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. are among companies that may be most hurt by the strongest earthquake on record to hit Japan, analysts and investors said.

Tokyo Electric, battling to avoid a meltdown at its Fukushima nuclear plant, faces “severe” rebuilding costs and Toshiba’s nuclear business may see increased scrutiny, said Minoru Matsuno, president of Value Search Asset Management Co. in Tokyo.

Radiation levels near the Fukushima plant, located 135 miles (217 kilometers) north of Tokyo, rose above Japanese limits after an explosion yesterday destroyed the walls of the reactor building. Nippon Steel Corp., Suzuki Motor Corp. and Canon Inc. today joined the growing number of companies saying their operations were hurt following the 8.9-magnitude earthquake on March 11 that rocked Japan and triggered tsunamis.

“For Tokyo Electric and anything nuclear-related, it’s going to be pretty bad,” said Makoto Kikuchi, chief executive officer at　Myojo Asset Management Japan Co., a Tokyo-based hedge fund advisory firm. “The biggest fear I have is what will happen at the nuclear power plant as it would be a real disaster if the situation deteriorates into another Chernobyl.”

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-13/tokyo-electric-toshiba-east-japan-rail-may-be-among-most-hurt-by-quake.html

[MineralMan]

1. I'm thinking it's a bunch of individual people who are the hardest hit,

not the corporations. Imagine that. I think I'll save my sympathy for the people of Japan, not faceless corporations.

[RevStPatrick]

2. Those individual people work for those faceless corporations.

Not having jobs to go to will only compound their misery.

[MineralMan]

4. You appear to have missed my point entirely.

And so it goes...

[RevStPatrick]

6. Apparently so.

Wanna explain it?

[MineralMan]

7. Not necessary, really. If it's not clear, keep reading the thread.

[Warpy]

3. Not only that, the corporate offices might still be in Japan

but Toshiba has offshored at least some of its manufacturing to China. That's where my Toshiba TV was made, at any rate.

I'll save my tears for real people, too. If they survived, they've lost everything and it all happened within minutes.

That's incredibly tough to take.

[MineralMan]

5. Yup. Warm, living people, have lost their lives or their homes, or

their families. I have a hard time, just now, being all that sympathetic to companies, some of which build these nuclear plants in tsunami zones. A very hard time.

Before the death toll is even in, and before the losses of the people have even been calculated, we're hearing that we should be sad for Japanese corporations. I think not.

[Warpy]

9. Nuclear plants pretty much have to be built in such zones

because they need a very large supply of cool water to cool down the circulating water around the fuel rods via a heat exchanger. That means most of them would have to be built on one flood plain or another or very large lakes or rivers. You can't put them more safely up on a plateau, in other words, and estuaries are seen as ideal locations.

It looks like they're going to have to redesign backup generator setups, put them on the building roof instead of on the ground next to it, for instance.

That's the problem with something vulnerable to catastrophic failure. You can't anticipate everything.

[Xithras]

8. Context. The article is from the Business News section of their website.

It does make sense that their business news journalists, and the business news section of their website, would have articles focused on the impact of the quake on business.