One of the casualties of Toshiba’s accounting scandal could be the outfit’s mediocre PC business.
The company is desperate to cover a huge billion dollar accounting hole and it is thought that flogging its notebook division might help.
Tosh has said that it could be forced to divest non-core activities and “accelerate concentration and selection of business areas and promote restructuring to enhance efficiencies”.
Tim Coulling, senior analyst at Canalys, said the PC division was a key part of the probe and flogging it off made sense.
The question is, who would want it?
Toshiba shipped 2.5 million notebooks globally in Q1 2015 which is not bad but not great when you consider that figure is based on cooked books. However it does have a brand power in the West which would make it an attractive target for a Chinese player looking to deepen its foothold in Europe or the US.
The downside is that Tosh’s PC business has not been performing well recently. Last year it said it wanted to get away from the consumer business and focus on B2B.