Toshiba shaken by its nuclear activity in the United States – The World

The conglomerate japanese, the u.s. subsidiary Westinghouse Electric, is in danger of more than $ 2 billion of penalties, has an urgent need for money.

World | 29.12.2016 at 10: 10am • updated 29.12.2016 at 10h43 | By Jean-Michel Bezat

has Already been weakened by the revelations on to an overestimation of the profits of 1.2 billion euros and a restructuring is severe in several areas (PC, semi-conductors, home appliances, medical…), Toshiba is facing a new crisis in the nuclear power this time.

The industrial conglomerate of japan has announced, Tuesday, December 27, that he will probably have to sign up ” several billion dollars “ of write-downs of assets on its nuclear activity u.s. – which will have a very negative effect on its results of 2016-2017.

The announcement led to a fall of 20,42 % of his action to the Tokyo stock Exchange Wednesday, after a decline of 12 % the day before. Threatened by a liquidity crisis in the coming months, the group nippon has once again been degraded by the rating agencies Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and the japanese R&I, who have been placed under surveillance.

also Read : Toshiba group plunged back into the storm

very expensive equipment

Named in June the CEO of a company in the midst of a crisis, Satoshi Tsunakawa has recognized that its subsidiary Westinghouse Electric had underestimated the risks during the acquisition of the services company CB&I Stone & Webster, active on the construction sites of nuclear power plants (engineering, project management, environment…). the ” We had considered at the time that the benefits of the redemption were considered to outweigh the risks “, he explained during a press conference. After a thorough study of these, Toshiba has realized his mistake. the ” This re-evaluation has been too late, “, ” said the boss.

In fact, Westinghouse, and therefore its parent company Toshiba, might have to pay more than $ 2 billion (1.9 billion euros) in penalties for delays of several years and additional costs of several billion on the building of four reactors of the third generation AP1000 constructed in the States of South Carolina and Georgia.

These equipments are very costly in an environment where the overproduction of shale gas, a cheap resource, increasingly used to generate power, has reduced the price of electricity. The cost of nuclear power has also increased with the strengthening of the safety of nuclear installations after the Fukushima disaster in march 2011.

strong competition

The crisis is so serious that Mr. Tsunakawa does not preclude review of the place of the nuclear activity :

” at the present time, we have taken no decision, but, in the future, it is a possibility. I say this without a concrete plan. “

Toshiba-Westinghouse is in competition with EDF-Areva, russia’s Rosatom, the consortium General Electric-Hitachi and his compatriot Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Not to mention the chinese CGN and CNNC, more and more enterprising on the market of nuclear power plants and the nuclear fuel cycle.

also Read : The battle of the nuclear plays in Uk

Toshiba is still a diverse group (semiconductors, flash memories, robots, elevators…) and could benefit from the inflation of the dollar against the yen. But he had to lay off 10 percent of its workforce since 2015 and could go as far as to assign a portion of its activity in the flash memory.

” A loss of several billion dollars, although partially offset by better results in other activities, will raise fears over the capital of the group “, prevent Yutaka Ban, and Kentaro Harada, analysts from SMBC Nikko, not excluding ” the risk for short-term cash “. This venerable company, founded at the end of the XIX^e century, is going to have to regain the trust of investors made wary by the revelations about the accounting manipulation discoveries in 2015.