Toshiba Corp is considering announcing its business plan for next fiscal year to 2018 in March, the Sankei newspaper reported, without saying where it got the information.
Toshiba is to set fiscal targets for the three-year period, the paper said. The Japanese company plans to restructure its operations and sell additional assets after the Japanese Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission recommended fining the company about ¥7.37 billion (US$61 million) for falsifying earnings, the largest financial penalty ever sought by the watchdog.
Company president Masashi Muromachi, who took over as the scandal unfolded this year, last week said that the firm is to detail a restructuring plan by Dec. 31 and could sell its personal computer and appliance businesses.
Toshiba — which makes nuclear power plants, semiconductors, washing machines, televisions and laptop computers — has been selling assets to raise cash.
It announced the sale of its image-sensor chip operations to Sony Corp earlier this month and sold stakes in Finnish escalator maker Kone Oyj and Japanese medical equipment manufacturer Topcon Corp.
The company is considering combining its PC operations with those of Fujitsu Ltd and Sony Corp spinoff Vaio, Muromachi said on Monday last week.
Muromachi said the company is also considering a deal with struggling display maker Sharp Corp to combine washing machine and refrigerator operations, but Sharp later issued a statement saying it was not in talks with Toshiba to merge its so-called white goods business.
Toshiba net income likely fell in the current quarter by about 96 percent to ¥2.3 billion, the average of five analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Sales likely fell 12 percent in the three months ending Dec. 31, the fourth quarterly drop.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day