(News Bulletin 247) – The Japanese giant will leave the Tokyo and Nagoya stock exchanges on December 20, after the success of the public purchase offer led by the Japan Industrial Partners fund.

The Japanese conglomerate Toshiba announced Thursday that its stock market listing in Tokyo and Nagoya should end on December 20, as a result of its recent takeover by a consortium of Japanese companies which intends to increase its capital to 100%.

The new owners of Toshiba, led by the Japan Industrial Partners (JIP) fund, have already obtained 78.65% of the group’s shares at the end of their public takeover offer on September 20, which valued it at 2,000 billion yen, or around 12.6 billion euros.

An extraordinary general meeting of Toshiba is now scheduled for November 22 in Tokyo to remove the final obstacles to its full takeover, which should only be a formality.

An ancient fallen empire

Former emblem of Japan’s power in electronics and IT until the 2000s, Toshiba then declined sharply, victim in particular of competition from other Asian countries (China, Taiwan, South Korea), but also of American groups like Apple.

Its situation then became critical from 2015 when a huge scandal over the cover-up of its accounts broke out, followed shortly after by the bankruptcy of its American nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse.

To survive, Toshiba had to sell numerous assets, including its jewel, its memory chip subsidiary Toshiba Memory (renamed Kioxia since 2018), and was forced to open the door to its capital to numerous activist shareholders.

These shareholders have gradually become more and more critical and demanding in the face of the chronic underperformance of the conglomerate, which ended up resolving last year to explore the avenue of a takeover in an attempt to gain new momentum.

(With AFP)