Revenue from Toshiba Corp's <6502.T> nuclear power plant business may reach 1 trillion yen ($12 billion) in the next three years, ahead of schedule, the Japanese industrial conglomerate said on Tuesday.

Toshiba spokesman Hiroki Yamazaki confirmed comments by the company's president, Norio Sasaki, in an interview with the Nikkei business daily that the firm could reach the sales mark ahead of its March 2016 target.

The firm is benefiting from growing demand for nuclear power plants in emerging economies such as China and Vietnam as nuclear facility construction in the United Sates slows, the Nikkei said.

Sales at its U.S. subsidiary, Westinghouse, are growing by 20 percent a year with the profit margin for Toshiba's overall nuclear reactor business likely to be as high as 10 percent within the next two years, Sasaki told the Nikkei.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly in Tokyo and Divya Sharma in Bangalore; Editing by Joseph Radford and Edmund Klamann)

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