Skip to footer

Facing huge losses, Toshiba to cut nearly 7,000 jobs

A scandal at one of the nation's top brands highlights how Japan is still struggling to improve corporate governance, despite efforts to beef up independent oversight of companies.

|
Thomas Peter/REUTERS
Toshiba Corp President and CEO Masashi Muromachi attends a news conference at the company headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, December 21, 2015.
  • By Yuri Kageyama Associated Press

| Tokyo

Scandal-plagued Japanese manufacturer Toshiba Corp. is cutting 6,800 jobs after projecting a net loss of 550 billion yen ($4.5 billion) for the fiscal year through March 2016.

Toshiba said Monday it will slash the jobs in its personal computer, video product and consumer electronic businesses. The job cuts equal about 3 percent of Toshiba's overall employees. It is also selling its TV plant in Indonesia.

Toshiba, which also makes nuclear power plants, has repeatedly apologized after acknowledging it had systematically doctored its books over several years to inflate profits by 152 billion yen ($1.3 billion).

Officials have said that mangers set unrealistic earnings targets, under the banner of creating a big "challenge," and subordinates faked results.

The scandal at one of the nation's top brands highlights how Japan is still struggling to improve corporate governance, despite efforts to beef up independent oversight of companies.

Toshiba said the job cuts in Japan will be by early retirement, but a significant number of overseas jobs will also be involved and steps will vary by each nation. It did not immediately have a detailed regional breakdown.

Earlier this year, Toshiba said it is selling facilities for making computer chips related to image sensors to Sony Corp.

Toshiba is also in trouble because it operates and is decommissioning, with Hitachi and other companies, the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which went into meltdowns after the March 2011 tsunami.

Toshiba said it had not yet fully calculated the impact of the nuclear disaster on its books.

The latest earnings projection means Toshiba is sinking into its second straight year of red ink, after racking up a nearly 38 billion yen ($312 million) loss for the fiscal year that ended in March.

Japanese media reports said the loss forecast for this fiscal year would be a record for Toshiba, surpassing the massive losses during the Lehman financial crisis.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Facing huge losses, Toshiba to cut nearly 7,000 jobs
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2015/1221/Facing-huge-losses-Toshiba-to-cut-nearly-7-000-jobs
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe