Friday, August 22, 2003
AKRON (AP) -- FirstEnergy Corp. lowered earnings Tuesday by a total of $99 million for 2002 and the first quarter of 2003 as the company restated its performance because of an accounting adjustment.
The first quarter 2003 restatement lowered earnings by $22.5 million, or 8 cents per share, to $218.5 million, or 74 cents per share.
The restatement reduced earnings for all of 2002 by $76.5 million, or 26 cents per share, to $552.8 million, or $1.89 per share.
The restatement was made because of a review of transition costs after FirstEnergy's $4.5 billion acquisition in 2001 of GPU Inc. and will result in an increase in net income of $381 million from 2002-2017, the company said.
The earnings restatement was not related to the investigation of the utility's role into last week's blackout that left 50 million people from the Midwest to the Northeast without power.
Experts have said the outage appears to have started on the Northeast Ohio power grid owned by FirstEnergy.