Since its founding in 1873 as Japan’s first maker of telegraph equipment, Toshiba has survived a litany of challenges, from the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, to having its factories bombed into rubble during World War II, to the drubbing of the Zune music player it co-developed with Microsoft. Now the conglomerate may be undone by four nuclear power plants under construction in the American South. Blown deadlines and budgets at the reactors in Georgia and South Carolina overseen by Toshiba’s Westinghouse Electric subsidiary resulted in the resignation of Toshiba Chairman Shigenori Shiga on Feb. 14 and a 712.5 billion yen ($6.3 billion) writedown on its nuclear reactor business.
That charge to cover cost overruns at Westinghouse eclipses the $5.4 billion that Toshiba paid for the company in 2006. The financial fallout of the nuclear business’s collapse is far greater. To stay afloat, Toshiba says it may have to sell a majority stake in its last remaining crown jewel: its flash-memory business, which makes chips used in smartphones and solid-state disk drives. The company already sold off its consumer electronics and medical equipment businesses following an accounting scandal in 2015. read the rest here