Toshiba’s board has agreed to sell its prized Nand flash memory chip unit to an international consortium led by the US private equity group Bain Capital in a ¥2.1tn ($18.9bn) deal designed to rescue the Japanese conglomerate from delisting.
People close to the winning group, which includes an investment of at least a $3bn by Apple and smaller commitments from Dell, Seagate, Kingston and the South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, said they were in the process of ironing out minor details but were likely to sign the deal later on Wednesday.
Toshiba’s board has come under intense pressure from the company’s biggest lenders, a trio of Japanese banks, to sell its prized asset ahead of a March 2018 deadline. The groups needs the proceeds to plug a huge hole in its shareholder equity created by massive writedowns on its US nuclear business.