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Toshiba Corporation (株式会社東芝, Kabushiki gaisha Tōshiba, English: /təˈʃiːbə, tɒ-, toʊ-/[2]) is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors, hard disk drives, printers, batteries, lighting, logistics, as well as IT solutions such as quantum cryptography.[3][4] It had been one of the biggest manufacturers of personal computers, consumer electronics, home appliances, and medical equipment. As a semiconductor company and the inventor of flash memory, Toshiba had been one of top 10 in the chip industry until its flash memory unit was spun off as Toshiba Memory, later Kioxia, in the late 2010s.[5][6][7]
Toshiba was founded in 1939 as Tokyo Shibaura Denki K.K. (Tokyo Shibaura Electric Co., Ltd) through the merger of Shibaura Seisaku-sho (founded in 1875) and Tokyo Denki (founded in 1890). The company name was officially changed to Toshiba Corporation in 1978. It is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, where it was a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX indices (leaving both in August 2018), the Nagoya Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange.
Having been a technology company with a long history and sprawling businesses, Toshiba has been a household name in Japan and looked upon as a symbol of the country’s technological prowess, though its reputation was heavily damaged following the accounting scandal in 2015 and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse in 2017, by when it had to shed a myriad number of its valuable or underperforming businesses, essentially eradicating the company’s century-long presence in consumer markets.[8][9][10]