Toshiba, the Japanese company synonymous with the country’s 20th-century dominance of electronics, has delisted from the Tokyo stock exchange after 74 years.
The manufacturer, associated in the UK with its 1980s “Ello Tosh, gotta Toshiba” advertising campaign, was taken private on Wednesday in an £11bn deal by a consortium of investors led by the private equity investor Japan Industrial Partners (JIP).
The financial services firm Orix, the utilities provider Chubu Electric Power and the chipmaker Rohm are also part of the group.
It follows years of activist investor pressure on the company from foreign investors after turmoil started by an enormous accounting scandal that shook one of Japan’s best-known companies and raised questions about the country’s insular corporate governance model.
Toshiba has already taken steps to try to revive itself under the new ownership, including a deal with the investor Rohm to manufacture chips to control power supply to electronics. Some analysts believe the company may be broken up to try to realise more value.
Toshiba traces its roots back to a factory set up in 1875, according to a company history, less than a decade after the end of 250 years of Japanese cultural and economic isolation. The successor Shibaura Engineering Works merged with the Tokyo Electric Company in 1939 and was renamed Toshiba in 1978.
After surviving the turmoil of the second world war, Toshiba’s star rose along with the Japanese economy, which became the world’s second biggest after the US.
Toshiba’s recent troubles were first hinted at publicly in 2015, when the company opened an investigation into what was revealed to be overstatement of profitsclosely followed by major problems at its nuclear technology subsidiary. That prompted share sales and the offloading of some parts of the business including the unit making flash memory chips for smartphones.
Japan’s government will be keeping a close watch. The company employs about 106,000 people and some of its operations are seen as critical to national security.