Toshiba Corporation (株式会社東芝, Kabushikigaisha Tōshiba, English: /təˈʃiːbə, tɒ-, toʊ-/[3]) is a Japanese multinational electronics company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo.

Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors, hard disk drives, printers, batteries, lighting, as well as IT solutions such as quantum cryptography.

[8][9] The company was also relevant in consumer personal computers, releasing the first mass-market laptop in 1985 and later ranking as a major vendor of laptops; it exited the PC business in 2020 having divested it into Dynabook Inc.[10] Toshiba faced trouble during the 2010s amid a much-publicised accounting scandal that affected its reputation, and the bankruptcy of its subsidiary nuclear energy company Westinghouse in 2017.

This forced the conglomerate to shed a number of underperforming businesses, essentially eliminating the company's century-long presence in consumer markets.

[18] After the demise of the founder in 1881, Tanaka Seisakusho became partly owned by General Electric and expanded into the production of torpedoes and mines at the request of the Imperial Japanese Navy, to become one of the largest manufacturing companies of the time.

[18] Hakunetsusha (白熱舎) was a company established by Miyoshi Shōichi and Fujioka Ichisuke [ja], two of Japan's industrial pioneers during the Tokugawa / Edo period.

[20] The group expanded rapidly, driven by a combination of organic growth and by acquisitions, buying heavy engineering, and primary industry firms in the 1940s and 1950s.

The incident strained relations between the United States and Japan, and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two senior executives, as well as the imposition of sanctions on the company by both countries.

In 2001, Toshiba signed a contract with Orion Electric, one of the world's largest OEM consumer video electronic makers and suppliers, to manufacture and supply finished consumer TV and video products for Toshiba to meet the increasing demand for the North American market.

In December 2004, Toshiba quietly announced it would discontinue manufacturing traditional in-house cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions.

[42] In December 2013, Toshiba completed its acquisition of Vijai Electricals Limited plant at Hyderabad and set up its own base for manufacturing of transmission and distribution products (transformers and switchgears) under the Social Infrastructure Group in India as Toshiba Transmission & Distribution Systems (India) Private Limited.

In March 2014, Toshiba sued SK Hynix, accusing the company of stealing technology of its NAND flash memory.

[56][57] On 21 July 2015, CEO Hisao Tanaka announced his resignation amid an accounting scandal that he called "the most damaging event for our brand in the company's 140-year history".

[65] In March 2016, Toshiba was preparing to start construction on a cutting-edge new semiconductor plant in Japan that would mass-produce chips based on the ultra-dense flash variant.

[72][73] In late December 2016, the management of Toshiba requested an "urgent press briefing" to announce that the newly-found losses in the Westinghouse subsidiary from Vogtle Electric Generating Plant nuclear plant construction would lead to a write-down of several billion dollars, bankrupting Westinghouse and threatening to bankrupt Toshiba.

[74][75] In January 2017, a person with direct knowledge of the matter reported that the company plans on making its memory chip division a separate business, to save Toshiba from bankruptcy.

[83][84][85] Construction delays, regulatory changes and cost overruns at Westinghouse-built nuclear facilities Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Waynesboro, Georgia and VC Summer units 2 and 3 in South Carolina, were cited as the main causes of the dramatic fall in Toshiba's financial performance and collapse in the share price.

[94] Later that month, the company announced that it would pull out of its long-standing sponsorships of the Japanese television programs Sazae-san, Nichiyō Gekijo, and the video screens topping out One Times Square in New York City.

[5] It also announced a number of other technologies waiting for commercialization, including an affordable solid-state Lidar based on silicon photomultiplier, high-capacity hydrogen fuel cells,[101][102] and a proprietary computer algorithm named Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm that mimics quantum computing, of which it plans to sell access to other parties such as financial institutions, social networking services, etc.

[104] In October 2020, Toshiba made a decision to pull out of the system LSI business citing mounted losses while reportedly mulling on the sale of its semiconductor fabs as well.

Two of the companies will respectively focus on infrastructure and electronic devices; the third, which will retain the Toshiba name, would manage the 40.6% stake in Kioxia and all other remaining assets.

They also rejected an alternative plan put forward by a large institutional investor that would have had the company search for buyers among private equity firms.

[116] Toshiba registered a total of 2,483 patents in the United States in 2011, the fifth-largest number of any company (after IBM, Samsung Electronics, Canon and Panasonic).

Conceding the abandonment of HD DVD, Toshiba's president, Atsutoshi Nishida said "We concluded that a swift decision would be best [and] if we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win".

[135] REGZA (Real Expression Guaranteed by Amazing Architecture) is a unified television brand owned and manufactured by Toshiba.

[13] Toshiba designed and developed PCs, predominantly laptops, under several product lines including Satellite, Portégé, Libretto, Qosmio and Tecra.

[142] Toshiba also partnered with China's Tsinghua University in 2008 in order to form a research facility to focus on energy conservation and the environment.

[143] This contract between Tsinghua University and Toshiba originally began in October 2007 when they signed an agreement on joint energy and environment research.

[143] The projects that they conduct work to reduce car pollution and to create power systems that don't negatively affect the environment.

[145] In late 2013, Toshiba (Japan) entered the solar power business in Germany, installing PV systems on apartment buildings.