Toshiba warns over its future

Toshiba on Tuesday warned its survival was at risk as the struggling Japanese industrial giant reported a loss of $4.8 billion in long-overdue financial results.

The company, a colossus of corporate Japan with 188,000 employees globally, had been threatened with expulsion from the Tokyo Stock Exchange unless it met the extended deadline of Tuesday to file its accounts.

The unaudited results showed the troubled firm lost 532.5 billion yen in April-December. It has previously forecast losses could balloon to more than a trillion yen in the fiscal year to March. Toshiba has been hammered by huge losses at its American nuclear business, Westinghouse Electric, which filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. last month.
The firm's auditors, PriceWaterhouseCooper Aarata, have refused to sign off the company's accounts, resulting in their publication being delayed twice.

To try repair its balance sheet, Toshiba is now selling a majority stake in its prized computer chip business. CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa has said he expects the unit to fetch at least 2 trillion yen ($18 billion).

Taiwan-based Foxconn, one of Apple's biggest suppliers, has offered as much as 3 trillion yen ($27 billion), according to The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. Toshiba declined to comment on the reports, and Foxconn didn't respond to a request for comment.

But the Japanese government is keen to keep Toshiba's hi-tech business in country, according to local media, and has called on domestic companies to form an investment partnership and bid for a stake in the memory chips business.

Toshiba has previously warned that its net loss for the full year could exceed one trillion yen, which would make it one of the biggest losses in Japanese corporate history. The Tokyo-based company is the world's second-largest chip manufacturer, with its products used in data centres and consumer goods worldwide, including iPhones and iPads.