Payback time

13 June 2018 By Quentin Webb

The electronics group will retire more than it raised from hedge funds last year. While it was flush with cash after selling a memory chip unit, the new CEO had plenty of reasons to hoard. That he didn’t aligns Toshiba with Japan’s broader push to be more investor-friendly.

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Toshiba aims to buy back 700 billion yen ($6.3 billion) of shares, the Japanese electronics company said on June 13.

The planned repurchase comes after the company closed the 2 trillion yen sale of its flash-memory business, Toshiba Memory Corp, to a buyout consortium led by Bain Capital, on June 1. Toshiba, which is retaining a minority stake, said the sale would yield a pre-tax profit of about 970 billion yen. It had also raised 600 billion yen in December by selling new shares to foreign hedge funds.

Toshiba said the buyback could be spread over more than one financial year, and that it had to consider issues such as complying with insider-trading rules and avoiding an “inappropriate” impact on its shares.

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