Foundation: 1875
Headquarters: Minato Ward, Tokyo
Chairman and CEO: Armand Dupreez
Executive Summary: Toshiba Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate with its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo. Established in 1939 through the merger of Shibaura Seisakusho (founded 1875) and Tokyo Denki (founded 1890), it was officially renamed Toshiba Corporation in 1978. The company has an extensive product and service portfolio that includes power systems, industrial and social infrastructure, elevators, escalators, electronic components, semiconductors, hard disk drives, printers, batteries, lighting, and IT solutions like quantum cryptography. Historically, Toshiba was a major player in personal computers, consumer electronics, home appliances, and medical equipment.
Toshiba was notably the inventor of flash memory and a dominant force in the semiconductor industry until it spun off its flash memory division into Toshiba Memory (later renamed Kioxia) in the late 2010s. The company is listed on the Tokyo, Nagoya, and London Stock Exchanges, symbolizing Japan’s technological advancement. However, its reputation suffered from an accounting scandal in 2015 and the subsequent bankruptcy of its Westinghouse subsidiary in 2017, leading to significant restructuring.
In response, Toshiba divested from various consumer markets, selling 80% of its client solutions and PC business to Sharp Corporation for US$36 million in June 2018. This business was rebranded as “Dynabook,” and by June 2020, Sharp had acquired the remaining 20% from Toshiba. In May 2019, Toshiba introduced non-Japanese investors to its board for the first time in nearly 80 years, and in November of that year, it transferred its logistics service business to SBS Group.
In January 2020, Toshiba announced plans to launch quantum cryptography services along with other innovations like an affordable solid-state Lidar, high-capacity hydrogen fuel cells, and the Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm, which mimics quantum computing for commercial use. However, by October 2020, Toshiba decided to exit the large-scale integration (LSI) business due to financial losses. Its annual revenue is in the range of US$35 billion.
