Toshiba to cut 5,000 jobs in latest bid to restructure

TOSHIBA plans to cut 5,000 jobs in Japan, or roughly a tenth of its domestic headcount, in a bid to cut costs and focus on its infrastructure and digital technology operations, the Nikkei reported on Wednesday (Apr 17).

The Tokyo-based company, whose sprawling operations span light bulbs to nuclear power plants, plans to slash workers at the parent firm’s non-core teams, the Nikkei said, without saying where it got the information. The company is expected to book a one-time loss of roughly 100 billion yen (S$881.3 million), it said.

Toshiba, which was bought out by a consortium led by Japan Industrial Partners last year, has been seeking to turn itself around. 

The recently privatised company has struggled for years with management missteps and scandal. It paid the country’s largest penalty ever for falsifying financial statements in 2015, and then had to sell off its crown jewel memory-chip business, Kioxia Holdings to pay for losses from an ill-fated expansion in the nuclear business. BLOOMBERG