Toshiba sees no end to nuclear winter
Japanese company Toshiba has warned that there is "substantial uncertainty" surrounding its ability to continue as a business, following its catastrophic foray into nuclear power that included the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2002 and cost overruns that led to the bankruptcy of its Westinghouse unit. Losses last year have left Toshiba with negative shareholder equity of JPY225.6bn ($2.1bn) at the end of December, threatening its listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Toshiba said it hoped the planned sale of shares in its chip division, its crown jewel, would alleviate the uncertainty over its future. While Toshiba has not said exactly how much of the business it will sell, even a minority stake is expected to be worth several billion dollars.

Any stability, though, would come at a price. Toshiba would be parting with parts of its most profitable asset and giving a competitor — very likely a foreign one — a foothold in the market for flash memory drives, where Japan has managed to retain some of its long-held edge.

“We will do what we can to avoid being delisted from the stock exchange,” Satoshi Tsunakawa, Toshiba’s chief executive, said at a news conference after apologizing to shareholders for Toshiba’s latest worrying turn. The company reported financial details for the quarter that ended in December after multiple delays and disputes with its auditors.

The financial problems are mounting.

The auditors have refused to certify Toshiba’s accounts — a highly unusual signal of doubt about the company’s ability to recover its financial health. Toshiba still has the support of its banks, which would be saddled with huge losses if they were to push the company into bankruptcy by calling in loans. But the auditors are, in effect, saying that Toshiba may need to undertake a more radical overhaul to ensure its survival.

Toshiba has already admitted defeat in nuclear power.

Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States last month, and Toshiba took a loss of more than $6 billion as it wrote down the value of the subsidiary, which it acquired in 2006 to further ambitions to become a world-leading nuclear-energy provider. Spiraling costs at American reactor projects, the upheaval caused by the 2011 Fukushima meltdown in Japan and competition from shale oil and gas output have hurt the company.