Toshiba has been looking to sell off their chip business for a few months now, and there’s been quite a few reports about different companies wanting to pick up the business, and now there’s another name in the hat. According to a report out of Reuters, Foxconn may bid up to $27 billion USD for the business, that’s about 3 trillion yen. That’s much higher than what SK Hynix Inc and Broadcom Ltd had reportedly bid for the business. Which were about 2 trillion yen or about $17.98 billion USD.
The reason behind Toshiba wanting to sell a majority or possibly all of their NAND chip business is to help make up for the huge writedown that their US business, Westinghouse is putting up, about a $6.3 billion writedown. Toshiba’s chip business is actually the second-largest behind Samsung, so whoever does pick up this business can really grab a strong foothold in the market. Which is why there are so many companies looking to buy the company from Toshiba. There was a report that Google might be interested, although they have been pretty quiet in the past few weeks about a possible bid. Foxconn has so far put in the largest bid, at least according to this report, but keep in mind that these are all preliminary bids right now, and nothing is set in stone.
Foxconn is the largest contractor of electronics in the world. They manufacturer most smartphones, tablets, laptops and just about every other piece of technology. This includes the iPhone, and many Android smartphones. While a company like LG, Samsung or Lenovo may design and build their new smartphone, they rely on a company like Foxconn to mass produce them so that they can get on store shelves sooner rather than later. So picking up Toshiba’s NAND chip business would be a huge coup for Foxconn, as it means that they could use their own chips in devices they are manufacturing, rather than going elsewhere, like to Samsung for getting these chips for devices that they are making. Keep in mind that this is a report for now, so we’ll need to take this all with a grain of salt, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see a deal reached pretty soon.