#FMCG Eight Talks##Consumption##Toshiba##Delisting#On December 20, a reporter from Beijing Business Daily learned that Japan's Toshiba Corporation will be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, ending the 74-year listing history since 1949. Since August this year, a consortium led by Japan's domestic fund "Japan Industrial Partners" (JIP) has officially launched a tender offer for Toshiba with a total amount of about 2 trillion yen, or about 98.5 billion yuan. Toshiba's official website released a document saying that the JIP consortium will acquire the remaining shares from ordinary shareholders and acquire Toshiba as a wholly-owned subsidiary.
Toshiba, which once enjoyed a big name in the TV industry, as the memory of the times, has now disappeared, in addition to the B-end business, Toshiba hard disk may still have a slight sense of existence on the personal side, mergers and acquisitions failed, nuclear energy failure, financial fraud and other series of blows, so that Toshiba is increasingly depressed, and when Toshiba will be the core sector of home appliances "selling" Chinese enterprises, how to position itself in the future has become the focus of the industry.
"A generation of memory" vanished
Toshiba TV was once a memory of a generation, Mr. Liu, who lives in Beijing, told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily that he bought one in the 90s of the last century, and then used it for nearly 20 years, and he would not have sold it if it were not for moving. In the 90s of the last century, Toshiba "rocket artillery" TV became famous, named after the two sound systems on its back that resemble rocket artillery, and it is precisely because of such a unique design that Toshiba TV became the first product to use integrated audio.
Today's TV market has no place for Toshiba,Xiaomi、Hisense、TCL The seven main brands represented by the market account for more than 90%,Among foreign brands,Even Sony、Samsung is difficult to match,According to Lotu technology statistics,2022Sony、Samsung、Philips、The total shipment of joint venture brands such as Sharp is about 30More than 100,000 units,The combined market share is less than 5%.
Today, Toshiba's business in the Chinese market is mainly on the B-end, including storage, motors, elevators and other products, and its white goods mainly cooperate with Midea, and black goods cooperate with Hisense.
For ordinary users, there may still be a slight sense of existence of Toshiba hard disk, Mr. Zhang, who is engaged in film and television editing, told reporters that the Toshiba Basics hard disk he uses when exchanging data on Windows, only need to be connected with a data cable to operate, unlike some products that need to install additional software, and Toshiba's hard disk is relatively light and compact, even if you don't backpack out and put it in your clothes pocket, it feels relatively stable after years of use.
Industry observer Hong Shibin told the Beijing Business Daily reporter that in addition to Toshiba's own poor management, many once well-known Japanese home appliance brands, now in the Chinese market has faded out of people's field of vision, the reason, in addition to the failure of competition, more important is the continuous mergers and acquisitions between Chinese and Japanese enterprises, for example, in 2011, Haier acquired Japan's Sanyo related electrical business, Sharp was acquired by Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai Group in 2016, the current so-called Japanese home appliances, most of its production lines in China, a small number of high-tech parts imported from Japan, in the publicityIn terms of resource investment, it is not as good as the local native brand.
A reporter from Beijing Business Daily interviewed Toshiba (China) Co., Ltd. on related issues, but did not receive a reply as of press time.
Make more than one wrong move
As a veteran Japanese company with a history of nearly 150 years, Toshiba's delisting is embarrassing. In 1875, Toshiba started with the electric light business, participated in the research of Japan's first arc lamp, and later Toshiba's business gradually expanded to home appliances, information and communication, semiconductors and other fields, Japan's first radar, the first rice cooker, the first laptop computer were all from Toshiba, in the 1996 Fortune 500 list, Toshiba with a revenue of 53 billion US dollars beat Sony, Honda and Nestle.
Toshiba's debacle dates back to 2006, when Toshiba spent $5.4 billion to acquire a 77% stake in Westinghouse Electric Company, a well-known nuclear reactor manufacturer in the United States, and Toshiba's determination was also reflected in the price, according to public information, Toshiba gave a purchase price premium of nearly three times.
After the acquisition, Toshiba mastered the technology of boiling water reactor and pressurized water reactor, and successfully harvested a batch of orders, but unfortunately, five years later, the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami caused a leak at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and among the six reactors that exploded, the No. 3 and No. 5 reactors were supplied by Toshiba, and it was because of this accident that Toshiba's nuclear power program was forced to stop.
In order to make up for the company's "hole" in nuclear power, Toshiba unscrupulously chose financial fraud, which was reported by internal employees in 2015, and Japan's securities regulator began a covert investigation into Toshiba's accounting violations in February of the same year, which showed that Toshiba's losses were not truthfully recorded.
The investigation found that Toshiba had committed about 151.8 billion yen in financial fraud from 2008 to March 2014, and that Toshiba's self-examination had accumulated a total of 156.2 billion yen, which was three times the 50 billion yen previously announced by Toshiba.
At that time, a third-party report clearly pointed out that Toshiba had committed financial fraud in four aspects, including the semiconductor business and the personal computer business, because the executives put forward a request that "performance targets must be achieved" in order to make up for the impact of the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident in Japan on Toshiba's nuclear energy business in 2011.
Industry observer Major General Ding analysis believes that the reason why Toshiba is facing today's results, made more than one wrong move, although its extension of mergers and acquisitions has expanded the scope of business, but with its main business has not been well coordinated, and even in the allocation of resources and the future development direction, Toshiba management and shareholders are full of contradictions, serious infighting, and then financial fraud, and then become the last straw that crushes its reputation, no longer gain the trust of the capital market.
Where to go after the "fire sale".
In 2015, Sony announced that it would buy Toshiba's image sensor business for 19 billion yen, and in 2016, Canon bought Toshiba Medical Systems, a subsidiary of the Toshiba Group, for a total of about $6.2 billion.
In the Chinese market, Midea and Hisense took over Toshiba's home appliance sector. In 2016, Toshiba sold 80.1% of its home appliance business to Midea and authorized a 40-year global license for the Toshiba brand, allowing Midea to sell its products under the Toshiba brand worldwide. In November 2017, Toshiba once again transferred its subsidiary, Toshiba Video Solution Co., Ltd., that is, 95% of the equity of TVS to Hisense Group, and resold the TV business to Hisense Group and integrated it into Hisense's video system.
From the perspective of the industry, in addition to technical integration, it is more important for domestic manufacturers to take over Japanese brands by relying on their original brand influence to accelerate the expansion of domestic enterprises, after all, in addition to Japan, Japanese brands also have a high degree of recognition in Southeast Asia.
Hisense Video once told a reporter from Beijing Business Daily in an interview that in the Japanese and Southeast Asian markets, the company continues to strengthen its overseas independent development capabilities. In 2022, in Japan, TVS set a benchmark for the high-end TV industry, with revenue and profit margins increasing year-on-year, and the market share of Hisense's TV sales increased by 4.8 percentage points year-on-year to 32.8%, and its market share of Dongshiba TV sales was 23.6%, and in Southeast Asia, the company continued to improve product competitiveness, brand influence, channel and retail management capabilities.
However, in the opinion of experts,Japanese brands are more of a "springboard"The role of the real "darling" is still its own brand,For example, in terms of TV,Although Toshiba is still trying to maintain its leading position in OLED、Music and painting atmosphere,But laser TVs that represent the future direction、ULed TV、8K TV、Touch smart screen and other products are firmly in the hands of domestic brands,Even overseas,Domestic brands are also competing with Japanese brands,According to 2022 Annual Ipsos survey data,Hisense TV's brand awareness in 18 overseas countries increased by 3 percentage points year-on-year,Brand equity increased year-on-year11.39%.
Looking at the ups and downs of Toshiba, Hong Shibin believes that for large enterprises, the most difficult problem is how to maintain superior products at the same time, but also to adapt to the trend of the times to expand new areas.
Beijing Business Daily reporter Tao Feng Wang Zhuli