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from the it's-non-of-your-NAND-business dept.
Toshiba is considering splitting its NAND business into a separate company and selling a stake in it to Western Digital or another investor:
In the recent months, Toshiba ran into a new accounting scandal that may require it to write down as much as 4 billion dollars because of cost overruns at its U.S. nuclear power business. The exact number has not been finalized, but the company is already studying various possibilities to offset the massive loss, which would anger its investors after the company already faced an accounting scandal in 2015. Nikkei reports that Toshiba is mulling to spin off its semiconductor business into a separate entity and then sell a 20% in the new company to someone like Western Digital for about $2.7 billion, while retaining 80% stake as well as operational control of the unit. Toshiba confirmed that it is studying the possibility of its memory business spin-off, but noted that no decision has been made and that the in-house NAND production is a focal business.
Toshiba and Western Digital already operate the world's largest NAND flash production complex in Yokkaichi, Mie prefecture, Japan. Formally, the manufacturing facilities belong to joint ventures between the two companies and WD buys wafers from Toshiba. It is not completely clear how the spinoff would work in this case and which parts of Toshiba's business will be up for sale.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
[Continued...]
Tom's Hardware also reports on the delayed release of Samsung's 4 TB SSDs due to NAND shortages:
In the months leading up to CES, we spotted a press document that listed Samsung's award winners for the show. Among the various consumer electronics products stood the 850 Pro 4TB as the only SSD we didn't already know about. The MLC large-capacity prosumer model has long been rumored since the release of the 850 EVO 4TB with 3-bit per cell V-NAND flash technology. Well, CES came and went, but the 850 Pro 4TB never materialized. We reached out to Samsung for comment and received a reply. Speaking through Allison+Partners, Samsung's North American PR agency, we received this response:
"As a result of the worldwide NAND shortage, Samsung is focused on allocating NAND to products where we see the greatest demand. We will let you know when further updates on the 850 PRO 4TB are available."
[...] On the surface, the response is exactly what we expected from the world's largest SSD manufacturer, but we quickly realized its true value. This is the first confirmation of a retail SSD release that has been delayed due to the NAND shortage. Several recent products have come to market in short supply, like the 960 Series, but none have been pushed completely off the shelf, as far as we know.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday January 22 2017, @04:48PM
The specific business failure was cascading multi-generational failed acquisitions. Toshiba overpaid for Westinghouse nuclear division which overpaid for some subcontractor. Everything was leveraged and financed to hell and back so a "minor" mistake in price vs value for a grandchild company multiplied by the effects of multiple steps of margin results in the grandparent company being semi-bankrupt-ish.
I'm having trouble coming up with a political analogy at all. I guess if the dogcatcher accepts money in exchange for political support from the aldermen, and the alderman accept money from the mayor in exchange for political support, and the dogcatcher can't afford to get re-elected because there just isn't enough dough to buy the votes, then for no obvious apparent reason the end result is the mayor loses his job due to lack of political support, although when you look into the situation and diagram out who depends on who, its obvious what happened. Sorta kinda.
I guess a standard SN automobile analogy is say I only have a dollar to my name and I give it to my son who buys a car from the junkyard because its trunk has gold bars hidden in it, but it turns out later the car is worthless. So um whoops suddenly I'm bankrupt.
The general economic problem is just the usual finance and buy on margin to hell and back situation because growth is perpetual and eternal, until it isn't.
The nuke financial accident is separate from the accounting accident they had a year or two previous which was basically Fing up too much. Accounting is sort of a multi-user shared hallucination and everyone pushes the narrative until eventually someone gets grossed out by too much sex with sheep or something and the whole edifice tumbles down simultaneously and thats what happened to Toshiba there. Well we really like the financial results if we all agree that sheep harnesses depreciate on a 7 year scale. Whoops nobody else likes that depreciation schedule guess we is broke, peace out bye bye.
Financialization economic risk is very BS-ish, which is a problem. Now that milling machine has 50HP spindle power or it doesn't, its really cut and dry. But a flock of competing accountants deciding what the "goodwill" column contains on a balance sheet define is your company is successful or bankrupt and "goodwill" is basically a slush fund or BS in practice.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:19PM
You're killing me, VLM. I was just trol-lol-lolling with my post. ;^)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:27PM
It is interesting how many ways Toshiba has shown it can fail in public. Like, you find yourself stuck in a ditch first step for most would be stop digging, but no not Toshiba they are such a WTF.
Are they shockingly unusually messed up or are people paying unusually high amounts of attention to this one Japanese company and the "lost decade" now in its like 30th year (made that up, sure longer than a decade though) is crushing things a lot worse than expected?