Toshiba Memory America has announced that the name of the company will change to Kioxia America, reports ZDNet. The name change will take place in October.
According to the company, the name is a contraction of the Japanese word kioku, which means memory, and the Greek word axia, which means value. “By combining ‘memory’ and ‘value’, Kioxia represents the company’s mission to elevate the world with ‘memory’, which is the basis of the company’s vision,” says the company.
Toshiba’s memory division was sold in June last year to a consortium led by the American private equity firm Bain Capital. The sale was worth more than 2 trillion JPY (about 18 billion dollars), making Toshiba Memory currently part of a consortium that also includes Apple, SK Hynix, Dell and Seagate Technology.
The memory chip activities used to be one of the most profitable parts of Toshiba, but the company was forced to split them off. In this way, the major cost overruns that were made in the company’s American nuclear projects must be compensated. The Westinghouse division, which is responsible for the nuclear projects that went wrong, suffered a loss of 712.5 billion Japanese yen in 2017, or about 6.6 billion dollars.
Compensating for loss
The sale of Toshiba’s Memory Division is part of a series of deals that the company has made in recent years, after selling all its medical systems business to Canon in 2016 and selling 80% of its PC business to Sharp last year.
It is also worth noting that both companies were fined a total of $5 million by the US Department of Justice (DoJ). The reason was the violation of U.S. antitrust laws, more specifically the fact that Toshiba and Canon violated the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act when the deal took place. The antitrust law requires companies that intend to merge to notify the Federal Trade Commission and the DoJ in advance. There must also be a waiting period before the transactions are made public, which has not happened in this case. Toshiba also suffered a net loss of more than 1 billion Japanese yen, about 9 million dollars, for the fiscal year 2019.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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