Aug 21, 2018 Japan's Toshiba, a leading global technology company in Japan, now it has to sell its most profitable flash chip business.
According to public statistics, since 2010, the 142-year-old Japanese technology giant has started to move from profit to loss. Due to the impact of nuclear power and other businesses, Toshiba has a huge debt of US$6.1 billion (about 41 billion yuan). It was forced to start the road of selling debts.
Toshiba is Japan's largest semiconductor manufacturer and the second largest integrated motor manufacturer. After the production of light bulbs, Japan's first domestic refrigerator, washing machine, microwave oven, vacuum cleaner, rice cooker, etc.They are all produced by Toshiba.
The inventor of the flash memory chip is also Toshiba of Japan. The global business is second only to Samsung Electronics of South Korea. It is currently the world's second largest manufacturer of flash memory chips. Toshiba has a large number of technical reserves and talents in the field of memory chips, and global technology giants are eyeing.
In September last year, the US consortium Bain Capital officially signed a contract with Toshiba to acquire Toshiba's core chip business unit for 18 billion US dollars to remedy the high losses of the US nuclear power business. Toshiba can only bear the pain to survive.
The money brought by the chip can help Toshiba get rid of the current crisis. According to the agreement reached by Toshiba and the US consortium Bain Capital, Toshiba later redeemed nearly 40% of the flash chip business.
In August 2018, Toshiba announced its performance in the second quarter of this year. According to public data, Toshiba’s operating income was 842.3 billion yen, and its net profit was 1.02 trillion yen (about 63.3 billion yuan), a year-on-year increase of more than 20 times, setting a record for Toshiba’s history.
According to industry analysts, on the surface, Toshiba’s performance history is actually only a short-term sale of chip business with a profit of 966 billion yen, which led to a surge in short-term profits. Except for the income from selling chips, Toshiba’s net profit is only More than 50 billion yen, Toshiba's future business environment will be more difficult.
Previously, OEM giant Foxconn also participated in the merger and acquisition of Toshiba business. Japan and the United States were worried that Toshiba’s chip technology would flow into the hands of Chinese companies. Foxconn’s bidding was rejected. Foxconn founder Guo Taiming also unfairly appeared in the bidding. The treatment expressed dissatisfaction.
After that, Bain Capital led the bidding consortium including Apple, Dell, Seagate Technology, Kingston and Hynix, and successfully won Toshiba's chip business.
In the past few years, Toshiba has not only sold its chip business. Two years ago, the United States acquired 80.1% of Toshiba Life Electric Co., Ltd. for 53.7 billion yen . Most of Toshiba's home appliance business was sold to Midea Group, Toshiba. Left the rest. This has enabled Midea to obtain a global license for Toshiba's home appliance brand for more than 40 years and more than 5,000 technology patents related to home appliances, and has taken over in the first half of this year.
In June 2018, Toshiba’s PC business was also acquired by Foxconn’s Sharp for $40 million, which means that another once-in-a-lifetime giant in the global PC market was sold, as early as the last century. In the 1980s, Toshiba of Japan launched the world's first personal notebook computer, but now Toshiba has fallen into such a situation that it has to be embarrassing.
Today, Toshiba's main business is only energy and infrastructure. The outside world believes that it is difficult to make up for the contribution of the chip business. In the short term, it is not optimistic. Can this century-old enterprise get out of the quagmire and where will they go in the future ？
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