
Toshiba considers listing or partial sale of chip business
Observers say there is a deal to be done between Toshiba and China’s state-controlled Tsinghua Unigroup, which has made an unsuccessful informal bid of $23 billion to buy US memory maker Micron Technology, and reportedly was rejected by South Korea’s SK Hynix after offering to buy a 20 percent stake in the company for about $5.3 billion (see Like Micron, SK Hynix rejects Chinese advances).
Toshiba CEO Masashi Muromachi said at a news conference that it while it was examining assets sales would keep control of semiconductor operations, as it is a core business for Toshiba, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
A Reuters report of the press conference said the core business remark applied to the NAND flash memory business and inferred that the digital logic business, called system LSI in Japan, and discrete chips as being, potentially, up for sale.
Toshiba’s ability to raise capital has been hampered since it confessed earlier this year to having mis-stated its accounts for a number of years previously while its need to restructure is more acute.
In October the company said it would withdraw from white LED production by the end of March 2016 and that it had agreed to sell its image sensor business to Sony for approximately $165 million. Toshiba has also seen its financing partner for flash memory, SanDisk being sold to Western Digital for about $19 billion.
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News articles:
Like Micron, SK Hynix rejects Chinese advances
Toshiba to sell image sensor business
Toshiba CEO resigns over accounting scandal
Report: SanDisk mulls company sale
