Toshiba's Profit Jumps on Strong Memory Demand
Toshiba reported a 76 percent jump in second-quarter operating profit on Thursday, driven by a strong performance from its memory chip unit which it recently agreed to sell for $18 billion.
The japanese said operating profit for the July-September quarter rose to 135.08 billion yen ($1.2 billion) from 76.88 billion yen a year earlier.
Toshiba also said it would raise its FY2017 investment plan
for the Storage & Devices Solutions Segment from 400 billion yen to 600 billion, mainly to speed up the installation of a memory chip production line at Yokkaichi. Toshiba Memory Corporation (TMC) will place equipment orders for Fab 6 at Yokkaichi Operations in FY2017, not FY2018 as previously planned.
Toshiba maintained its operating profit forecast for the year ending March at 430 billion yen, versus a 480 billion yen average of 12 analyst estimates.
The company said it expects an annual net loss of 110 billion yen due to taxes related to the sale of the memory chip unit.
Toshiba agreed in late September to sell Toshiba Memory Corporation to a group led by Bain Capital. Toshiba says TMC has asked SanDisk, its collaborator in joint ventures for investment in manufacturing equipment at TMC's Yokkaichi Operations, whether it intends to jointly participate in the investment for Fab6.
Seperately, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation announced it has signed an agreement with Dell Technologies as the key infrastructure provider to build Artificial Intelligence (AI) services for mission-critical customer use cases.
Artificial intelligence in Industrial IoT (IIoT) is expected to grow in support of use cases that include social infrastructure, energy, retail/logistics, buildings/facilities and mobility/transportation. Supporting use cases such as preventive maintenance, crime prevention, disaster recovery, cyber security, demand prediction and transportation quality improvement will require high performance infrastructure.
Both companies have agreed to evaluate the performance and functionality required for AI services in mission critical areas and will collaborate to build a highly available environment for Toshiba's analytics platform, SATLYS, utilizing servers, storage and cloud technologies from Dell Technologies businesses, Dell EMC and Virtustream.