End of an era for electronics giant Toshiba
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Not being beholden to show growth every quarter, no matter what long-term consequences it may have, should be liberating and beneficial.
The pattern of Private Equity take over is clear
1. Buy out public stock
2. Extreme Cost Cutting to make the company profitable by sacrificing Engineering and Customer Service
3. Massive Increase in prices to make the company profitable by sacrificing long term market share for short term profits
4. Sell the company again (or in pieces) before it goes bankrupt due to 1 and 2.
This has happened time and time again.
So much so that today if one of my vendors gets bought out by PE we immediately start planning a migration of that technology
Most recent example is Broadcom who uses a PE-like playbook, we are now evaluating what can replace vSphere...
This shocks the concience for me - how is there always someone stupid enought to buy a comoany thats a ticking time bomb?
It was a good name that got bought and then came out with crappy products we who used to work at RadioSnack had to sell.
Amazing how •consumers• drop money on brand name alone.
This is still a common and ongoing process. Hell the same brand is manufactured by several companies, for example Brand X may have a pressure washer that is made by MTD, but a Lawn Mower that is made by someone else, and a chainsaw that is made by a 3rd company. All with different levels of quality.
Even if you see a list of who "owns" the brand, many of them contract with each other to make the tools and equipment so it hard to tell who is actually making the product.
Because Kenmore was a "face" of Sears, who had a vested interest in staying in business, they had a motivation to say "let's pick competent suppliers, and hold them to specific quality metrics." If that "major brand" model started getting returned too much, the next model Kenmore would be sourced from someone else.
Today's brand resurrections seem like less of a long-term play, and more as a shot of "instant credibility" for more short-lived products. My last office had a bunch of Westinghouse-brand LCD monitors. (That pretty much dates it to the late 2000s) They were competent enough, but the brand basically vanished after a couple of years. I suspect they discovered there was little value in the brand as a long-term venture-- they probably didn't actually sell very many based on "Grandma's 14" Westinghouse CRT was awesome back in 1966" and there wasn't enough market impact to fully jolt it back to life as a memorable, going-forward brand.
They aren’t dead, but they’re delisted.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstories/toshiba-delisted-...
Could also be Patent Capture if the companies has alot of patents
If the company is large it will be sold in pieces to individual competitors of the different market segments.
If the price is right a large competitor will buy it just to shut it down, basically a marketing cost for customer acquisition..
There are plenty of "valid" reasons a failing company driven into the ground by management is still able to be sold...
It’s not like Sony or LG when they stopped releasing phones and laptops.
I rarely see someone with a new Sony TV, now that’s the end of an era.
It was a great purchase. Lasted me years. I self-taught myself coding on that machine. I owned a few Toshiba laptops since. It was my go-to brand. After they started disappearing from shops, I ended up going with HP, then Dell then Asus. None of them were quite the same standard as Toshiba.
Lest we forget, Toshiba invented NAND flash only for them and Japan (namely the patent office) to throw it out the window for the likes of Intel and Sandisk to pick it up and create an entire industry.
There is perhaps no better time to say that, nothing of value was lost here.
Might need to elaborate a little ? Such a sweeping statement.
This combined with an introverted national culture that encourages the various companies fight each other (eg: Toshiba vs. Sony vs. Panasonic) rather than stand together and face the global market, and Japan has lost nearly every single thing they once achieved the top spot in. Government corruption, as was the case here, is icing on the cake.
I say again: Nothing of value was lost here; any value Toshiba had they already threw away decades ago.
Also, I'm Japanese. I call dibs when it comes to (justifiably!) trash talking my heritage.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujio_Masuoka
[2]: Masuoka and colleagues presented the invention of NOR flash in 1984, and then NAND flash at the IEEE 1987 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) held in San Francisco. Toshiba commercially launched NAND flash memory in 1987. Toshiba gave Masuoka a few hundred dollar bonus for the invention, and later tried to demote him. But it was American company Intel which made billions of dollars in sales on related technology. Toshiba press department told Forbes that it was Intel that invented flash memory.
What? Why?
The Keiretsu based structure bred complacency & selling average products to each other.
As innovation technology in Silicon Valley skyrocketed, Toshiba made slideware & agreements that offered no tangible value.
They would talk about the cloud, sign agreements with IBM but have zero real budget for implementation.
Instead they would focus on continuing to build and sell non competitive solutions that meant divisions were ordered to keep making non competitive products built by thousands of engineers at a loss.
The board cooking the books sealed their fate.
This sort of culture could explain why Sony still sells $1000 digital Walkmen and luxury Android devices with a headphone jack.
That applies to all of Japan, not just Toshiba.
"Nails that stick out will be hammered in." (出る杭は打たれる。)[1] is an age old saying in Japan; those who stand out or are otherwise different from the masses will be forced into compliance.
This cultural tradition has stifled many Japanese attempts at innovating, because doing something new is different from the status quo.
[1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E5%87%BA%E3%82%8B%E6%9D%AD%E3%81%A...
Huh? Since when do American companies like Google and Apple stand together instead of fighting with each other? Are we in the same universe? Competing companies don't stand together in any capitalistic society I'm aware of.
>Japanese people are very talented, but that also means they oftentimes can't understand the value of inventions and technology.
As another comment pointed out, the exact same thing has happened many, many times at American companies: Xerox PARC and the GUI are the poster child here.
>Also, I'm Japanese. I call dibs when it comes to (justifiably!) trash talking my heritage.
I'm an American living in Japan. I've noticed that it's very common for Japanese people to think that something about their country or culture (especially negative things) is unique to Japan, when in fact it's much the same in countries and cultures all around the world. A common example is how many really seem to think Japan is the only place in the world with 4 seasons (!), but there are many other more substantive things.
And Kodak invented the digital camera only for Canon and Nikon to steal their lunch. And Xerox invented the GUI and let Apple steal their lunch. And GM invented the EV1, the world's first mass produced EV and then let Tesla and BYD steal their lunch. And IBM invented the PC and ... you get the point already.
Same with HP, SUN, SGI, Cisco, Blackberry, Nokia, Intel, etc insert your favorite $EXAMPLE here. Google is also on a similar path.
It's not a country problem, it's a "big and old company problem", which has fossilized and lacks future vision so stays conservative and slowly atrophies.
Only the US has managed to avoid this trap "thanks" to its lack of industry unions and social policies, coupled with a free market economy, start-up friendly tax system, and strong VC culture focused on disrupting existing players by throwing big money at new risky ideas.
While the VC investment culture and focus on disrupting existing players is non existent in most other countries, coupled with the stronger social policies and unions, like in Europe for example, means there's a lot of political pressure (and lobbying!) to support the existing big old established players that contribute to the economy and employ tens of thousands of workers, to keep the status quo, no matter how antiquated and stagnating they are, instead of letting the free market run its course and letting them slowly whither die and focus instead on creating new businesses and industries in their place.
This is also compounded in some of the countries I listed above by the ageing demographics who's retirement prospects are tied to the old declining industries(like in Germany), meaning their votes, government policies and financial aid will focus on keeping those old declining industries on life support for as long as possible, instead of focusing on supporting newer industries instead at the expense of the older ones. It's what the people vote for.
Exceptions would be Singapore, Switzerland, and some of the UK-Ireland, Nordic and BeNeLux countries that have a strong education system focused on research and innovation and a business friendly tax and legal system for VC investors and who's population isn't too invested and entrenched in old declining industries.
The rest was - from a financial point of view - a sideshow. They have some awesome technology companies, highly reputed and lots of knowledge and research happening there relative to its size, but that doesn't change the financial picture.
The US welcomed the engineers/scientists/wealthy fleeing the war and it continued after 1945. Same with the UK, but to a lesser extent I expect.
Of course the US had people of similar ability, but the migration from European countries to the US (and other places) had the double effect of reducing the talent in one place and adding to it in another.
The foundation of the US tech industry was created in the years after WW2.
So was Germany and Japan. Both of which became much wealthier post-WW2 than before thanks to their booming industries.
The difference is the US managed to successfully pivot away from the post-WW2 boom industries into the 21st century growth industry, aka IT or tech, while the other two countries got complacent and stagnant, pigeonholed in the same post-WW2 industries that made them wealthy in the first place but which aren't driving as much growth anymore today.
They created it but don't know how to market it.
At same time Steve Jobs and his right hands was at Japan manufacturers so they can see about their technology. And someone shows to them that disk... they was finally found missing component for an iPod.
That said, activist investors, the root cause, are a plague. Generally they want to boost short term profit at the expense of the longer-term. They are generally not interested in investing in the future rather cost cutting. Certainly most large companies could do with more efficient allocation of spending, but the US / western drive for short-term shareholder value is anathema to the good of the company longer term.
Kioxia, formerly Toshiba Memory, is flourishing under new western management after they were freed from Toshiba and Japan's ineptitude.
Toshiba desired to not cause change and market disruption was hated by Japanese business culture.
Eventually inaction & fear led to destruction. Quite sad really.
Toshiba to be delisted after 74 years, faces future with new owners
Not so much different.
If a company hires you, they're not hiring you to be like everyone else.
He's got plenty of videos on China too.
China is so big that it's unlikely they'll experience such ceilings anytime soon. They will continue with their shady, protectionist practices, possibly forever.
If China manages the headwinds well, they can pull a South Korea. If not, they'll become a Thailand.