Toshiba Nominates non-Japanese Directors to New Board
Toshiba Corp. on Monday announced that it has nominated 12 director candidates, including seven new independent director candidates, for election to its Board of Directors at the company’s general meeting on June 26, 2019.
The new Toshiba Board would include five international Directors, among them the first non-Japanese directors to sit on Toshiba’s Board in nearly 80 years. The new board would also increase the number of independent directors to ten from seven.
Toshiba expects the new directors to bring the company's board "further diversity that will help to drive sustainable growth and increased shareholder value over the mid- to long-term, including deep knowledge and experience in international business, corporate portfolio management, business transformation and M&A, and expertise in capital markets and capital allocation."
The board shake-up comes after U.S. hedge fund King Street Capital Management, one of Toshiba’s largest shareholders, last month said it planned to nominate independent directors to replace a majority of the board.
Toshiba's business is spanning power systems, semiconductors and home appliances.
The company sees a profit of 140 billion yen ($1.28 billion) for the year to March 2020, versus 35.4 billion yen a year earlier, in line with the target the company set in its Toshiba Next Plan - Toshiba's five-year transformation plan announced in November aimed at making the company one of the world’s leading cyber-physical systems (CPS) technology companies.
Toshiba's restructuring measures included the liquidation of its British nuclear power unit and sale of its laptop and television set businesses.
The company isd focusing on profitability from generators, after the crisis linked to the bankruptcy of U.S. nuclear power unit Westinghouse forced Toshiba to sell its prized memory chip unit and left it with low-margin social infrastructure businesses.
But the company's U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) business is locked into a contract that requires Toshiba to pay a fixed processing fee for LNG over 20 years from Freeport LNG - regardless of whether Toshiba can later find buyers for the fuel at prevailing rates.
Toshiba on Monday reported improved full-year net profit thanks to the sale of its chip business, but said operating profit was sharply down.
Toshiba Corp. said Monday its group net profit in the year ended March rose 26 percent to a record ¥1.01 trillion after selling its prized chip unit in June.
In the year that ended March, Toshiba's net profit jumped 26 percent to 1.01 trillion yen ($9 billion), chiefly because of "profit from completion of the sale of the Memory business," the company said.
Toshiba Memory Corp. was sold to an international consortium including U.S. private equity firm Bain Capital LP, Apple Inc., Dell Inc. and South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc.
The firm said its operating profit dropped 58.9 percent to 35.4 billion yen, partly due to restructuring costs, on sales of 3.69 trillion yen, down 6.4 percent.
For the current year to March 2020, it forecast a jump of 295 percent in operating profit to 140 billion yen, after the completion of restructuring and other projects, on sales of 3.4 trillion yen.