Troubled Toshiba To Split Into Two Firms Instead of Three

Toshiba said it would divide into two companies and sell non-core assets, scrapping an initial three-way split that faced fierce criticism from activist shareholders. From a report: The Japanese tech giant plans to spin off the devices business, which includes semiconductors, and list it, Toshiba said in a statement Monday in Tokyo. It scrapped an earlier plan to separate out its infrastructure operations, which will instead continue to come under Toshiba. Splitting into two companies would be cheaper and smoother than the original plan, it said. Toshiba also designated Toshiba Tec, its listed electronic equipment business, as a non-core business, it said, though it stopped short of saying it would sell the unit. The company will also use 300 billion yen ($2.6 billion) of excess capital for shareholder returns over two years, it said. Shares of memory-chip business Kioxia Holdings will continue to be held by Toshiba, it said, but the firm will seek to monetize the shares "immediately" and return proceeds to shareholders. Kioxia has been pursuing an initial public offering, but has also been reported to be in talks to merge with Western Digital.

In case someone wants to read about it

[MrLint]

https://abcnews.go.com/Interna... [go.com]

Re:

[jacks smirking reven]

Thanks, it's interesting.

I remember in the olden times when Toshiba was pretty much a household name for a lot of things. There was a time Toshiba Satellites were pretty much a top brand of laptops. Now I wouldn't even remember to look them up if I needed a new machine.

Re:In case someone wants to read about it

[Whateverthisis]

There's some earlier history that news article doesn't cover. Toshiba unfortunately made an enormously risky bet into nuclear power by buying Westinghouse in 2005. The nuclear industry took a huge hit with Fukishima, which freaked everyone out and a whole lot of projects were canceled. On top of that, Westinghouse made a bad move in selling their design of the AP-1000 to China in exchange for one job there; now they are competing with China's state owned power company SNPTC who sells the exact same reactor design but bigger; the CAP-1400.

Nuclear power as an industry is big revenue with big risks, and those two moves combined with project delays and cost overruns at two plant projects in the US made Westinghouse declare bankruptcy. On top of that, Toshiba was probably reluctant to admit the big losses they were seeing with Westinghouse, which led to some irregular accounting practices that they got nailed for too (although this problem was corporate wide, not just related to Westinghouse). They sold off Westinghouse at a loss to Private Equity, but the damage spread through the corporation as they had to sell off well performing business units to handle their losses. Now what's left is a bunch of guys at corporate who have lost trust with their investors due to corrupt accounting practices and a bunch of business units that are middling performers. Not a good place to be in to right that ship.

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[dwywit]

Their laptops became unavailable for a while, then they returned, then subsequently renamed as "Dynabook". I think that caused a big loss of confidence in the product.

IME their laptops (except the basic entry-level models) were some of the best, at least as far as longevity was concerned. Not great performers, they were still putting 5,400 RPM HDDs even in the Core i7 models, but I had a Core2Duo that I sold to a customer in 2009, and traded in on a new one ~2015, that I was still using up until 2019. It st

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[cheesybagel]

Westinghouse was hiding massive losses which were not accounted for when Toshiba bought them. Westinghouse basically bought the construction company building the nuclear reactors in the US sites. The construction company had serious delays and massive cost overruns. Plus one of the two US reactors got cancelled as result of the time delays and cost overruns only making the situation worse.

The Chinese getting the design was not a major factor yet. For one it did not contribute to the losses since the constru

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[Babel-17]

For a time they relabeled some of the best disks you could get for burning DVDs, the Taiyo Yuden DVD-R brand. And their CRT TVs had top of the class color accuracy.

What About the Hard Drive Division?

[NoMoreACs]

I really like their HDDs; I hope they don't get sold to somebody who will ruin them.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

This article [go.com] specifically mentions chips and storage staying as a Toshiba company. Clearly storage and chip manufacturing is a profitable venture for them, so they're hanging onto it as one of the companies rather than liquidating it.

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[NoMoreACs]

This article [go.com] specifically mentions chips and storage staying as a Toshiba company. Clearly storage and chip manufacturing is a profitable venture for them, so they're hanging onto it as one of the companies rather than liquidating it.

Thanks. That's good to hear.

Damn splitters

[Bu11etmagnet]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]