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▼ Toshiba Faces Grilling From Shareholders
- Category:Event
CHIBA (Jiji Press) — Toshiba Corp. President Satoshi Tsunakawa directly apologized to shareholders on Wednesday for the company’s continuing failure to fix its fiscal 2016 earnings and a delay in sealing a contract to sell its Toshiba Memory Corp. unit.
“We deeply apologize for repeatedly causing inconvenience and anxieties,” Tsunakawa said at an annual general shareholders’ meeting at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba.
Toshiba worked to cut a deal on the flash memory unit sale with a Japan-U.S.-South Korea consortium led by state-backed investment fund Innovation Network Corp. of Japan before the shareholders’ meeting.
But the company has still been unable to do so because coordination among the possible investors is taking longer than expected.
Just before the shareholders’ meeting, Toshiba announced that it has yet to reach an accord on the chip unit sale, which is part of the company’s efforts to resolve its negative net worth.
The delay is attributed to a dispute with Western Digital Corp., Toshiba’s U.S. chip business partner, over the subsidiary sale. During the shareholders’ meeting, Tsunakawa claimed that the sale process is being “unfairly hampered” by the U.S. hard disk drive maker.
The annual meeting, attended by 984 shareholders, took place after Toshiba was granted on Friday an extension of the deadline for submitting an annual financial report to regulators to Aug. 10 from the end of June.
The extension is due to continuing disagreement with its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata LLC, over massive losses at Toshiba’s troubled U.S. nuclear business unit Westinghouse Electric Co.
Last month, the ailing Japanese electronics and machinery maker provisionally reported, without PwC Aarata’s auditing, that it suffered a group net loss of nearly ¥1 trillion in fiscal 2016, which ended in March, and saw its debts exceed assets at the end of the business year.
On Friday, the company said that its negative net worth on March 31 is seen to have expanded to ¥581.6 billion from the earlier estimated ¥540 billion. Toshiba is set to be demoted to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s second section from the first section on Aug. 1 and will be delisted unless it clears the excess debt by the end of March 2018.
At the shareholders’ meeting, which lasted a little more than three hours, the Toshiba management gained approval for its proposal to reappoint nine board directors, including Tsunakawa, on a temporary basis until an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting for reporting finalized fiscal 2016 earnings is held in August or later.
Some shareholders criticized the Toshiba management for a lack of a sense of crisis and slow progress in the reform of the company’s corporate culture.
“We deeply apologize for repeatedly causing inconvenience and anxieties,” Tsunakawa said at an annual general shareholders’ meeting at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba.
Toshiba worked to cut a deal on the flash memory unit sale with a Japan-U.S.-South Korea consortium led by state-backed investment fund Innovation Network Corp. of Japan before the shareholders’ meeting.
But the company has still been unable to do so because coordination among the possible investors is taking longer than expected.
Just before the shareholders’ meeting, Toshiba announced that it has yet to reach an accord on the chip unit sale, which is part of the company’s efforts to resolve its negative net worth.
The delay is attributed to a dispute with Western Digital Corp., Toshiba’s U.S. chip business partner, over the subsidiary sale. During the shareholders’ meeting, Tsunakawa claimed that the sale process is being “unfairly hampered” by the U.S. hard disk drive maker.
The annual meeting, attended by 984 shareholders, took place after Toshiba was granted on Friday an extension of the deadline for submitting an annual financial report to regulators to Aug. 10 from the end of June.
The extension is due to continuing disagreement with its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata LLC, over massive losses at Toshiba’s troubled U.S. nuclear business unit Westinghouse Electric Co.
Last month, the ailing Japanese electronics and machinery maker provisionally reported, without PwC Aarata’s auditing, that it suffered a group net loss of nearly ¥1 trillion in fiscal 2016, which ended in March, and saw its debts exceed assets at the end of the business year.
On Friday, the company said that its negative net worth on March 31 is seen to have expanded to ¥581.6 billion from the earlier estimated ¥540 billion. Toshiba is set to be demoted to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s second section from the first section on Aug. 1 and will be delisted unless it clears the excess debt by the end of March 2018.
At the shareholders’ meeting, which lasted a little more than three hours, the Toshiba management gained approval for its proposal to reappoint nine board directors, including Tsunakawa, on a temporary basis until an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting for reporting finalized fiscal 2016 earnings is held in August or later.
Some shareholders criticized the Toshiba management for a lack of a sense of crisis and slow progress in the reform of the company’s corporate culture.
- June 29, 2017
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