Toshiba

Toshiba Corporation started life in 1939 when two Tokyo companies, Shibaura Seisaku-sho and Tokyo Denki, merged into Tokyo Shibaura Denki. The first of those, Shibaura, traced back to 1875 and a man often called Japan's Thomas Edison, Tanaka Hisashige, who built the country's first telegraph and a steam locomotive. The company shortened its name to Toshiba in 1978, a portmanteau that stuck.

For decades, Toshiba was everywhere in Japanese homes and offices. It made the world's first mass-market laptop, the T1100, in 1985, invented flash memory in the 1980s, and built everything from TVs to nuclear reactors. At its peak, it ranked among the top ten semiconductor makers and was a major PC vendor. But the 2010s hit hard. A 2015 accounting scandal revealed years of profit padding, and its U.S. nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in 2017, leaving Toshiba with billions in losses. The company sold off its flash memory unit (now Kioxia), its laptop business (which became Dynabook), and other consumer divisions to stay afloat.

Today, Toshiba is a private company, owned by a consortium led by Japan Industrial Partners since December 2023, when it was delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange after 74 years. Its focus has shifted entirely to B2B infrastructure: power plants, elevators, railway systems, semiconductors, and IT solutions like quantum cryptography. The consumer brand that once sold TVs and laptops is gone, but the company still operates globally, with headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, and major offices in Houston, London, and across Asia.[edit]