Foundation: 1875
Headquarters: Minato Ward, Tokyo
Chairman and CEO: Armand Dupreez
Executive Summary: Toshiba Corporation is a Japanese is a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. Toshiba was founded in 1939 as Tokyo Shibaura Denki K.K. through the merger of Shibaura Seisakusho, which was founded in 1875, and Tokyo Denki, which was founded in 1890. The company name was officially changed to Toshiba Corporation in 1978. Its products and services include power and industrial and social infrastructure systems. It also specializes in elevators, escalators, electronic components, semiconductors, hard disk drives, printers, batteries, lighting, and IT solutions such as quantum cryptography. It was one of the largest manufacturers of personal computers, consumer electronics, home appliances, and medical equipment. As a semiconductor company and the inventor of flash memory, Toshiba was a major player in the chip industry until its flash memory unit was spun off as Toshiba Memory, later Kioxia, in the late 2010s. The company is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Nagoya Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange. Being a technology company with a long history and sprawling businesses, Toshiba is a household name in Japan and beyond, and it has long been viewed as a symbol of the country’s technological prowess. Its reputation was dented by an accounting scandal in 2015 and the bankruptcy of its subsidiary Westinghouse in 2017. After this, Toshiba was forced to shed a number of underperforming businesses, eliminating the company’s century-long presence in consumer markets. In June 2018, Toshiba sold 80% of its client solutions, personal computers, and business unit to Sharp Corporation for US$36 million. Sharp renamed the business to “Dynabook,” a brand name Toshiba had previously used in Japan, and began releasing products under that name. In June 2020, Sharp exercised an option to acquire the remaining 20% percent of Dynabook shares from Toshiba. In May 2019, Toshiba announced that it would put non-Japanese investors on its board for the first time in nearly 80 years. In November, the company transferred its logistics service business to SBS Group. In January 2020, Toshiba unveiled a plan to launch quantum cryptography services. It also announced a number of other technologies waiting for commercialization, including an affordable solid-state Lidar based on silicon photomultiplier, high-capacity hydrogen fuel cells, and a proprietary computer algorithm called Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm that mimics quantum computing. Toshiba outlined plans to sell access to the algorithm to other parties such as financial institutions, social networking services, etc. In October 2020, Toshiba pulled out of the large-scale integration (LSI) business, citing financial losses. Its annual income is in the range of US$35 billion.
