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Toshiba logo on a house in Tokyo
Photo: ISSEI KATO / REUTERS
The Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, which is under constant fire from activist shareholders, wants to split itself into three parts and thus create the liberation.
By 2023, the energy, infrastructure and digital business on the one hand and the semiconductor and hard drive division on the other are to be split off and listed separately on the stock exchange, as Toshiba announced.
That leaves the core business with the printer division (Toshiba Tec) and the 41 percent stake in the memory chip manufacturer Kioxia.
Toshiba also wants to monetize the latter.
The majority of the subsidiary, which was spun off in 2018, is held by the financial investor Bain Capital.
The demerger plan is the result of a five-month strategy review following a reputational management scandal.
According to insiders, Toshiba hopes to move activist shareholders such as Elliott, Third Point and Farallon to exit.
The company said on Friday that the split is about creating value for shareholders.
But some Toshiba investors are not convinced of this, according to shareholder circles.
"A split makes sense when the valuation of a highly competitive business is overshadowed by other business areas," said chief strategist Fumio Matsumoto of Okasan Securities.
"But if such a business doesn't exist, you can only create three mediocre medium-sized companies with one split."
146-year-old company grinds its way from crisis to crisis
The conglomerate, now 146 years old, has been moving from crisis to crisis since an accounting scandal in 2015.
Two years later, Toshiba secured a $ 5.4 billion capital increase from more than 30 foreign investors - but that also brought activist investors on board.
The tensions between them and the board of directors have dominated the headlines ever since.
Shareholders forced an investigation, which concluded in June that Toshiba and the Department of Commerce had worked together to prevent foreign investors from influencing last year's annual general meeting.
Toshiba said after further investigation that managers around the former CEO acted unethically, but not illegally.
The report complains that it is too dependent on the Ministry of Commerce.
The problems also stemmed from an "over-anxiety about foreign funds" and a "lack of will to develop a sensible relationship with them".
kig / Reuters