Toshiba to focus on nuclear, robotics industries
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E-mail China Daily, July 1, 2016
Toshiba Corp plans to write down its personal computer investment in China after the spinoff of its home-appliance division, as it aims to focus on more lucrative sectors, such as nuclear power and robotics.
"Our PC business is not doing well, and it seems to be on a downward trend, so we are trying to narrow the business and focus on other sectors with high potential," Shiro Saito, corporate senior vice-president of the Tokyo-based company, told China Daily in Tianjin.
Toshiba is cutting its PC workforce by about 900 people and its sales bases by more than half globally, and may sell its Hangzhou production base in China due to slumping business, according to earlier reports.
But Saito denied that the firm was pulling out of PC production in China. "It's true that we are cutting costs, but we are keeping the PC factory in Hangzhou," he said on the sidelines of the Tianjin Summer Davos, a three-day economic forum that ended on Tuesday.
The Japanese high-tech and energy giant is in talks with another two Japanese companies, Fujitsu Ltd and VAIO Corp, to merge their PC businesses.
As China is on track to build nuclear power plants and hydropower projects to optimize its energy mix and leverage domestic experience for export, Saito, who is also general manager of Toshiba's technology division, said it will invest more in the power generation sector.
In 2006, Toshiba acquired US-based Westinghouse Electric Co, which developed the third-generation AP1000 nuclear technology. However, Japan's nuclear industry has experienced sluggish growth since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
Flagship AP1000 nuclear power plants are now under construction in Shandong and Zhejiang provinces.
Toshiba is also eyeing China's robotics market, an industry with massive potential, as the country aims to triple its annual production of robots used in the manufacturing sector to 100,000 within five years.
The Japanese company is developing chat-robots that are intelligent enough to answer questions over the phone, and plans to use the technologies in China's banking system.
Luo Jun, CEO of the Asian Manufacturing Association, said robotics can be used in many sectors such as healthcare and education, and even in banking, as labor costs rise in China.
"China is pushing for a shift from traditional production to industrial automation, so the market potential is just enormous," he said.
Semiconductors account for 40 percent of the Japanese company's total revenue, followed by elevators, air conditioners, lighting and power generation and technology.
Toshiba is also setting up a research and development center for air-condition control systems in Hangzhou.
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