Toshiba managed to close the sale of its chip unit to a consortium led by Bain Capital valued at approximately $18 billion, the Tokyo-based tech giant said Friday. The deal itself has been in the making for over a year now, with its initial completion target being set for the first quarter of 2018. China’s antitrust watchdog insisted on a more in-depth review of the proposed sale, with its investigation delaying the transaction until now. The Toshiba Memory Corporation is officially being acquired by K.K. Pangea, a company owned by Bain Capital. Toshiba is investing around $3.2 billion back into Pangea as part of the transaction and will have a minority stake in the firm amounting to roughly 40.2-percent, with the overall deal hence seeing more than $21 billion exchanging hands.
Toshiba has been eager to offload its most profitable division so as to cover its accounting holes incurred by the bankruptcy of its nuclear business in the United States – Westinghouse Electric Company. Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late March of 2017, leaving its parent with massive losses that it wasn’t able to resolve with loans due to sanctions imposed on its business following a 2015 accounting scandal. The sale of TMC to Bain was still up in the air last month, with both parties confirming Beijing was yet to greenlight the deal at the time. The Bain-led consortium includes Apple, Dell, Kingston, Seagate, and SK Hynix, with the lattermost company being the main reason for the major antitrust scrutiny over the proposed transaction seeing how the deal allowed it to take out a direct rival and the world’s second-largest manufacturer of NAND flash memory chips.
Bain and Toshiba initially reached an agreement nine months ago, with the new development ensuring a future for the struggling Japanese technology giant. Toshiba raised close to $5.5 billion from hedge funds in December while its prospects were less certain so as to avoid a stock exchange delisting. It’s presently unclear whether any of its now-surplus cash will be used for generating returns for investors in the short term.