Toshiba Corp is considering an initial public offering (IPO) in Switzerland for energy metering company Landis+Gyr AG by the end of September, raising much-needed cash to bankroll its turnaround.
Landis+Gyr, which makes gear to track household power consumption, is one of several assets Toshiba has put up for sale as it tries to make up for multibillion-dollar losses at its Westinghouse nuclear energy unit.
The company selected a Japanese-led group last month as preferred bidders for its prized memory chip business.
An IPO on the SIX Swiss Exchange is one of several options on the table and a sale of the business remained an alternative, the Japanese company said in a stock exchange filing yesterday.
Toshiba was said to have courted acquisition bids for the Swiss subsidiary, which had been expected to fetch about US$2 billion.
CVC Capital Partners and Hitachi Ltd had made a joint offer to buy Landis+Gyr from Toshiba and Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“No decisions have been made with regard to either the IPO or the dual-track potential trade sale,” Landis+Gyr chief executive officer Richard Mora said on a call with journalists. “We have a significant amount of interest with regard to Landis+Gyr, both on the trade sale and on the IPO as well.”
Toshiba is selling assets to contend with the bankruptcy of its Westinghouse nuclear business, which may result in a loss of as much as ¥1.01 trillion (US$9.2 billion) for the year that ended in March.
Toshiba, slated for demotion to the second board of the Tokyo stock exchange, now has until the end of March next year to shore up its balance sheet or face delisting.
It bought Landis+Gyr in 2011 for US$2.3 billion to boost its energy-management sales. It owns a 60 percent stake and INCJ holds the rest of the firm, which makes meters that allow utilities to check energy use remotely and can be connected to equipment that shows customers when rates are highest.
UBS Group AG and Morgan Stanley are joint global coordinators and joint bookrunners for the IPO, with Credit Suisse Group AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co as additional joint bookrunners.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by