Money-losing Japanese electronics and nuclear company Toshiba Corp. has until Aug. 10 to get auditors to sign off on its earnings statements, or else it faces the risk of getting delisted.
Tokyo-based Toshiba, whose U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse Electric Co. filed for bankruptcy protection in March, said Friday it received an extension of an earlier June deadline to give its earnings report for the fiscal year that ended in March.
But it’s getting bumped down from the first to the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Toshiba said earlier this week it chose a consortium led by a Japanese government-backed fund as the preferred bidder to purchase its lucrative computer memory chip business. It sorely needs to cash to survive.
Toshiba’s board of directors chose the bid for Toshiba Memory Corp., totaling about 2 trillion yen ($18 billion), from the consortium of Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, Bain Capital Private Equity and the Development Bank of Japan.
But Western Digital of the U.S., which has acquired some SanDisk chip operations, including a joint venture with Toshiba in Japan, reiterated its opposition to such a move. It said Toshiba “has no right” to transfer the joint venture without its consent.
Toshiba has accused Western Digital of interfering with its sales efforts. Such sales can be sensitive because they involve the transfer of technology.
Toshiba said talks were continuing on selling the memory chip business, with hopes they would be settled by a shareholders’ meeting next week.
Toshiba revised its unaudited earnings report to a 995 billion yen ($9 billion) loss. It had already warned such losses would balloon to nearly 1 trillion yen, even after the Westinghouse bankruptcy filing, although that move was expected to help Toshiba in the long run.
Last month, it had projected a 950 billion yen ($8.6 billion) loss for the fiscal year that ended…