Toshiba reaches deal to sell most of its chip unit

TOKYO — Toshiba, the huge but struggling Japanese conglomerate, traded some of its size for financial security Thursday by selling most of its profitable microchip business.

It was not the way the company, which has long been accused of being bloated and directionless, had hoped to slim down.

Toshiba said it had signed a deal to sell 60 percent of the microchip unit, Toshiba Memory Corp., to a group of international investors that includes Bain Capital and Apple. The deal, which followed months of tumultuous negotiations, will net Toshiba about $14 billion.

Toshiba has staked its future on the sale, with the proceeds earmarked to help repair the financial damage from a disastrous foray into nuclear power in the United States. The episode threatened to bankrupt the company, one of Japan’s biggest and proudest.

But it has been defined by a stultifying management hierarchy, a dogged focus on hardware and a scattered portfolio of businesses.

“Toshiba is one of Japan’s last zombies,” said Jesper Koll, the chief executive of WisdomTree Japan, an investment firm. “It’s the last of the big conglomerates that does not have a defined strategy.”

The company had been negotiating the chip deal for months.

In addition to Apple, investors include three other U.S. businesses: Seagate Technology and Kingston Technology, two data storage companies, and a venture capital arm of Dell, the computer maker. The South Korean semiconductor maker SK Hynix, and Hoya, a Japanese manufacturer of optical equipment, were also named as investors.

Toshiba will retain just over 40 percent of the unit, one of the world’s largest producers of the flash memory chips used to store data in smartphones and other digital devices.