• 
• 

"If we don't act soon, we won't be able to avoid the effects of currency-exchange rates," president Yukiyoshi Okano said in a Bloomberg Television interview broadcast yesterday. Daikin is "looking into" the production shift, he said, without providing more details.

The Australian dollar fell 21 per cent last month against the yen, the currency's biggest drop since it began trading freely in December 1983 and extending the loss in 2008 to 33 per cent.

Daikin last week cut its annual earnings forecast for the second time this year, citing the yen's surge against the US dollar and economic turmoil in European markets.

The company earned about 60 per cent of profit outside Japan in the year ended March 31, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.