(Tokyo) The Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, privatized last year after many setbacks, announced Thursday that it would cut up to 4,000 jobs in Japan through early retirement as part of a restructuring plan.
“This was a difficult decision for management to make, but we believe these steps are essential to putting Toshiba back on the path to recovery and growth,” a company spokeswoman said.
This plan will be implemented by the end of November by offering employees aged over 50 who meet specific criteria voluntary early retirement, she said.
Mass layoffs are rare in Japan, but the use of early retirement plans or voluntary departures has increased sharply.
Toshiba agreed last year to be bought by a consortium of Japanese companies led by the fund Japan Industrial Partners (JIP), after a long standoff with its activist shareholders.
“Privatization gave us the opportunity to fundamentally resolve Toshiba’s structural problems and return to ‘what Toshiba should be’,” reads a press release presenting the group’s ‘revitalization plan’.
Toshiba further writes that it wants to “rationalize the staff structure by examining duplicative operations” to “achieve the objectives of the new medium-term business plan”.
Former emblem of Japan’s power in electronics and IT until the 2000s, Toshiba then declined sharply, victim in particular of competition from other Asian neighbors (China, Taiwan, South Korea), but also of American groups like Apple.
Its situation then became critical from 2015 when a huge scandal over the cover-up of its accounts broke out, followed shortly after by the bankruptcy of its American nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse.
To survive, Toshiba had to sell many assets, including its jewel, its memory chip subsidiary Toshiba Memory (renamed Kioxia since 2018), and was forced to open the door to its capital to numerous activist shareholders.
These shareholders gradually became more and more critical and demanding in the face of the chronic underperformance of the conglomerate, which ended up resolving in 2022 to explore the avenue of a takeover in an attempt to gain new momentum.