The sale of the memory chip business of Toshiba has ultimately come to an end. The company has announced its deal with Bain Capital consortium, consisting of Apple and various other tech companies.
According to reports, the deal is worth two trillion, three hundred million yen – which is roughly $18 billion. Concluding this business has been very necessary for Toshiba because the deal gives Toshiba a much-needed cash infusion since the company earlier lost billions of dollars through its Westinghouse division.
Though the consortium includes Apple, Dell, Hoya, Hynix, Seagate, and Kingston, Toshiba will retain 40% of the ownership of the unit.
Now the share of Toshiba has been transferred to K.K. Pangea, a purpose-built company controlled by the consortium and under Bain Capital’s umbrella. Since Toshiba has been able to repurchase 40.2 percent of common stock, the right to vote has been given to the tech giant Pangea. Although the unit is no longer under Toshiba’s majority rule, it says the new company is “expected” to become an affiliate in the future without confirming when it will happen.
Apart from this, it is completely under mystery how much each of these companies has invested in the acquisition. On the basis of earlier reports, Apple may have put up as much as $3 billion yet, which has not been officially confirmed.
Apple is known to have an intense desire for the acquisition as it is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of NAND chips. Since supply issues have plagued the NAND chip market in the last six months, which increased the pricing and shipment delay of the gadgets, so this shortage could be the main reason behind the step that Apple took by increasing the price of its high-capacity iPad Pro models last year.
According to reports, there were bids from three groups interested in acquiring Toshiba’s NAND chip business, among which Apple was a part of each of the three. But as the deal closed, it was the Bain Capital consortium with whom Toshiba merged its business.
