When news leaked on Wednesday that Toshiba was examining a $20bn buyout proposal from European private equity giant CVC, it left many stakeholders stunned. Not least, said people close to CVC, some of the firm’s own executives.
Buying Toshiba, whose chief executive Nobuaki Kurumatani is the former head of CVC’s Japan business, would be the firm’s biggest deal ever, and the largest leveraged buyout in Japan’s history, transforming a market that has slowly warmed to private equity dealmaking but has never had a transaction involving a strategically important household name.
Toshiba’s internal machinations in the week the offer became public, as well as the sheer scale of the proposition and the reaction from the board, have led people close to the company to interpret it as a sign of a much deeper power struggle within the 146-year-old group.