Toshiba Corp, the Japanese maker of products such as flashmemory chips, elevators and nuclear reactors, may replace its president Norio Sasaki after a shareholder meeting in June, an official at the company said.
Toshiba’s board may name corporate senior executive vice president Hisao Tanaka, 62, to take Sasaki’s place, the official said, asking not to be identified as the decision has not yet been made.
Sasaki would become vice chairman and chairman Atsutoshi Nishida would retain his post, the person said.
Sasaki has headed the Tokyo-based company since June 2009, leading Toshiba to two consecutive years of profit after it reported a record ¥344 billion (US$3.7 billion) net loss in the year ended March 2009 amid a slump in demand for memory chips.
The 63-year-old executive, who joined Toshiba in 1972, has focused on acquisitions and capital spending targeting chips, hard disks and smart grids to boost earnings.
Toshiba bought San Antonio-based energy technology management company Consert Inc for more than ¥1 billion this month, it said on Feb. 7.
It had acquired Swiss electronic-metering company Landis+Gyr AG in 2011 to boost its energy-management sales.
The Nikkei Shimbun reported the planned change earlier. Toshiba is not the source of the report and no decision has been made, Atsushi Ido, a company spokesman, said by phone on Saturday.
Tanaka joined Toshiba in 1973 and has held his current title since June 2011, according to the company’s Web site.
Toshiba posted a larger-than-expected profit for the three months ending on Dec. 31 because of higher semiconductor prices, a weaker yen and rising sales of power equipment. Net income totaled ¥29.3 billion, the company said on Jan. 31.
The company, the world’s second-biggest producer of flash memory, expects full-year net income of ¥110 billion, operating profit of ¥260 billion and ¥6.1 trillion of sales, it said on Jan. 31.
Toshiba has gained 22 percent in Tokyo trading this year after advancing 7 percent last year.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts