Japan's SoftBank Group says its first-half net profit jumped four and half times from a year ago. That's as its investments in tech stocks jumped and it sold off assets to shore up its finances.
The company said on Monday that net profit in the April-September period came to about 1.9 trillion yen, or about 18 billion dollars.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has welcomed Japan's commitment to reducing the country's carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide announced the goal in his policy speech on Monday.
Two major Japanese railway operators expect their net losses this fiscal year to be their biggest since they came into being following state rail privatization. The firms attribute the losses to the coronavirus outbreak.
East Japan Railway Company on Wednesday published its business projections for fiscal 2020 ending next March. The firm expects to post 3.98 billion dollars in losses.
Officials at Honda Motor reported a net loss in the April-to-June quarter. The coronavirus pandemic weighed heavily on global sales of cars and motorbikes.
Executives say the company lost 80.8 billion yen or around 760 million dollars in the quarter.
The latest earnings forecast from Nissan Motor suggests the coronavirus is making life even harder for the struggling automaker. The firm is projecting a net loss of more than $6 billion in the current fiscal year.
Company executives say the loss for the April to June quarter reached 285.5 billion yen, or 2.7 billion dollars. They say the full-year net loss is likely to be 670 billion yen, or about 6.4 billion dollars. That's about the same as the previous year.
Homeless people are one particularly vulnerable group that are being affected by the state of emergency declaration by the Japanese government.
In Tokyo, about 4,000 of them sleep in 24-hour internet cafes, including a large number of women fleeing domestic violence.