Toshiba Plans Major Layoffs to Relist on Tokyo Stock Exchange
Toshiba Corporation is planning to lay off thousands of workers in an effort to relist its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The company will announce its medium- to long-term business plan in mid-May, which will include details of the workforce reduction.
One possible method for the reduction is by consolidating certain sections of Toshiba's many subsidiaries at the Tokyo headquarters. The company was delisted in December 2023 after being acquired by Japan Industrial Partners (JIP) in a public tender offer totaling about 2 trillion yen ($13 billion).
Toshiba currently has about 67,000 workers in Japan, spread across a large number of subsidiaries involved in various sectors. While the exact number of layoffs is not yet known, sources say it will be the largest since 2001, when about 17,000 workers were let go after Toshiba was hit by a major downturn in the information technology sector.
The company's annual sales have also been halved, from 7 trillion yen to about 3 trillion yen, partly due to the selling off of some business operations. For the April to December period last year, Toshiba recorded a net loss of 107 billion yen, mainly due to the poor performance of its hard disk sector.
Toshiba is aiming to relist in five years, and plans to improve its profitability by reducing payroll and reorganizing its business structure. The company is focusing on energy and social infrastructure as potential profit growth sectors, as well as exploring new business opportunities leveraging its digital technology.
Toshiba has faced major management scandals in the past decade, including accounting fraud disclosed in 2015. Its U.S. nuclear power plant unit, Westinghouse Electric Co., went bankrupt in 2017. The company received about 600 billion yen from 60 overseas investment funds to stay afloat, resulting in many of its shares being held by overseas fund investors. This has led to intensifying battles between multiple activist shareholders and Toshiba's management.