TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's Shinsei Bank said Wednesday it would return to the black in the current business year to March as it steps up efforts to write off bad loans and speed up its restructuring.

The midsize lender expects a net profit of 10 billion yen (S$149 million) for the current year, after a 143 billion yen loss the previous year, when it was hit by the global financial crisis.

"We have set our net profit forecast at 10 billion yen as we have positively raised reserves for loan losses and are fully reviewing our business and corporate structure," president Masamoto Yashiro told a news conference.

The bank reduced some 100 jobs in the three months to March through an early retirement programme and plans to cut 300 more by September, said Yashiro, who took office last year.

The bank, which is about one-third owned by US buyout firm JC Flowers & Co., has been hit hard by the global credit crunch and last year said it would sell its Tokyo headquarters for more than one billion dollars.

Shinsei Bank, whose name means "new life," was Japan's first lender to be bought by a foreign fund after its forerunner, Long Term Credit Bank, collapsed under a pile of bad debts in the late 1990s.

Yashiro refrained from commenting on news reports that his bank is in talks with Aozora Bank about a possible merger that would create the nation's sixth biggest commercial lender.