JIP-Led $15 Billion Tender Offer for Toshiba to Start Aug. 8
(Bloomberg) -- A long-delayed $15 billion buyout offer for Toshiba Corp. will begin Tuesday, as the Japanese industrial electronics firm seeks to close a troubled chapter in its 148-year history.
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A consortium led by investment fund Japan Industrial Partners Inc. will start a tender offer to buy all outstanding Toshiba shares at ¥4,620 per share between Aug. 8 and Sep. 20, Toshiba said in a statement on Monday. That price, above Toshiba’s closing share price of ¥4,584, was unchanged from a March announcement.
Toshiba, which holds knowhow spanning air conditioners and nuclear power equipment to semiconductors and quantum computing, sees the take-private bid as a chance to regain its footing following more than a decade of scandals and management overhauls.
“Today marks Toshiba’s exit from an eight-year-long tunnel,” Toshiba Chairman Akihiro Watanabe said on an earnings call. Toshiba on the same day reported a net loss of ¥25.4 billion ($180 million) for the three months to June, after its devices and storage solutions profit almost halved from a year ago.
Once a household name in consumer electronics, Toshiba’s earnings have been dragged down by the shuttering of Japan’s nuclear power plants in the wake of the meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima plant in 2011, just five years after its $5 billion acquisition of Westinghouse Electric Co.
The inventor of NAND flash memory was forced to sell its majority stake in its memory chip business to a group led by Bain Capital in 2018. Now re-branded Kioxia Holdings Corp., that unit has fallen technologically behind Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. It’s in talks to merge with Western Digital Corp. as sliding prices eat into its ability to invest and keep up.
A deal between Western Digital and Kioxia may hurt shareholder willingness to participate in the Toshiba tender, but that would be an issue for JIP to resolve, Watanabe said.
As negotiations with the JIP-led consortium dragged on, Toshiba’s stock floundered, dropping about 20% from a peak last year. Rival Hitachi Ltd.’s shares hit a record high earlier this month.
The Tokyo-based company created the world’s first laptop PC, launched a global media format war in the 2000s and developed NAND flash memory, essential to store and process data on mobile devices and vast data centers without powering down.
But after more than a decade of reeling from one scandal to another, Toshiba has lost much of its technological edge.
Kioxia, which is still 40%-owned by Toshiba, is the world’s No. 3 maker of NAND, while Toshiba is now the smallest of the world’s three remaining hard-disk drive suppliers. Both sectors are getting squeezed by tepid electronics demand.
--With assistance from Vlad Savov.
(Adds executive comment from earnings call on Kioxia)
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