(October 29, 2009) TOKYO — Mazda lifted its full-year guidance to call for a slightly smaller operating loss, citing better sales and currency rates than it had anticipated.

Mazda, held 13 percent by Ford, had revised its first-half estimates earlier this month when it announced a share sale of about $1 billion, but had left its forecast for the October-March second half unchanged.

Mazda now expects an operating loss of 12 billion yen ($133 million) for the year to March, 1 billion yen less than what it had announced in early October. It sees a smaller net loss of 17 billion yen, instead of 26 billion yen, on tax-related adjustments.

For the July-September second quarter, operating profit plunged 82 percent to 5.93 billion yen, but beat an estimate of a 4.5 billion yen loss in a poll of four analysts by Thomson Reuters. Net profit was 707 million yen, against a 14.5 billion yen profit last year, as revenue plunged 30 percent to 562.1 billion yen.

Mazda, like the rest of the industry, is slashing fixed costs and boosting manufacturing efficiencies to cut losses from its underused factories. Mazda, Japan's fifth-largest automaker, is aiming to be profitable at a factory utilization rate of 80 percent in Japan at current exchange rates, even as it exports the bulk of its cars sold globally from Japan.

Mazda is raising up to 93.9 billion yen ($1 billion) in a share sale to invest in new technologies including hybrid systems.

Executives have said the company is in the process of studying whether to seek technological tie-ups — not necessarily with top shareholder Ford — or to go it alone.