Toshiba sells down its stake, and Shibaura Mechatronics becomes independent (2023)

Two stages set by the seller’s convenience

The subject of this decision was, from first to last, Toshiba. Shares in a company it had itself carved out in 1939 were cashed in to fill the hole opened by the collapse of its nuclear business. That the 2018 sale stopped at the roughly 10% needed to drop the holding out of equity-method accounting, and that the remaining 11.73% was left in place for another five and a half years, had nothing to do with circumstances at Shibaura Mechatronics. The market’s constraint — that releasing it all at once would break supply and demand — and Toshiba’s own restructuring timetable split the disposal into two stages. What the company being sold could do was to build a receptacle by buying back $25.6M (¥4bn) of its own shares, and to watch its share price move until the price was fixed.

Even so, the figures after the sale have grown. Sales of $434.1M (¥61bn) in the year to March 2023 reached $556.4M (¥88bn) three years later, and the operating margin passed 17% — the result of stacking up orders from customers who need no explanation about a Toshiba affiliation. In the year to March 2024, when Toshiba disappeared from the list of principal shareholders, the number of shareholders rose from 4,258 to 11,912. Stock that one company had held for eighty-four years scattered to more than ten thousand holders.