Toshiba Planning to Buy Back Memory Unit Shares Purchased Last Year by Apple and Others

Last June, Toshiba completed the sale of its memory chip unit to a global consortium of companies led by Bain Capital and including Apple, Dell, Kingston, and Seagate Technology. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Toshiba is now set to buy back these shares under a refinancing plan.

Specifically, the four companies (excluding Bain Capital) are set to sell their preferred shares back to Toshiba for about $4.5 billion by the end of the month, and together they made a few hundred million dollars on the investment in Toshiba. Toshiba received the capital to buy out the companies from Japanese banks, totaling $11.8 billion.

Looking ahead, the company is now planning to become publicly listed in Tokyo near the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020. Toshiba's plan to re-acquire its memory chip unit comes over two years after it first announced plans to sell the unit in January 2017, followed by bidding for the unit that began in March 2017.

The Bain-led consortium eventually prevented Western Digital from taking control of Toshiba's memory chip business, which at one point threatened legal action against Toshiba. Apple eventually joined a "last ditch" effort to win the bid with Bain Capital, which will remain a majority owner of the memory chip unit even after Toshiba buys back its shares from the other four companies.