Toshiba Reaches Deal With Bain-Apple Group to Sell Chip Business

Toshiba, the huge but struggling Japanese conglomerate, traded some of its size for financial security by selling off most of its profitable microchip business. It was not the way the company, which has long been accused of being bloated and directionless, had hoped to slim down.

Toshiba said it had signed a deal to sell 60 percent of the microchip unit, Toshiba Memory Corporation, to a group of international investors that includes Bain Capital and Apple. The deal, which followed months of tumultuous negotiations, will net Toshiba about $14 billion. In addition to Apple, investors include three other American businesses: Seagate Technology and Kingston Technology, two data storage companies, and a venture capital arm of Dell, the computer maker. The South Korean semiconductor maker SK Hynix, and Hoya, a Japanese manufacturer of optical equipment, were also named as investors. Toshiba itself will retain just over 40 percent of the unit, one of the world’s largest producers of the flash memory chips used to store data in smartphones and other digital devices.