Toshiba Corporation today approved Toshiba Memory Corporation’s (TMC) proposed investment in production equipment for the Fab 6 clean room, the next generation flash memory production facility under construction at Yokkaichi Operations. In this third round of investment, TMC will invest approximately 140 billion yen in the installation of additional manufacturing equipment, including deposition and etching equipment.

TMC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Toshiba dedicated to the production of flash memory and related products, is constructing Fab 6 to boost output of 96-layer BiCS FLASH, its innovative 3D Flash memory. Demand for TMC's next generation 3D Flash memory is increasing significantly on fast growing demand for enterprise SSD for datacenters and servers. TMC expects continued strong growth in 2018 and beyond, and the timing of its investment in Fab 6 positions it to capture this growth and expand its business.

As Toshiba announced on November 9, 2017 in “Toshiba Memory Corporation to Further Accelerate Equipment Investment in FY2017”, the FY2017 investment plan for the Storage & Devices Solutions Segment before reclassification of the Memory business as a discontinued operation was 600 billion yen. This latest announcement does not change this plan.

Additionally, there is no change to the FY2017 forecast announced on February 14, 2018, as the investment will be made during FY2018.

On March 26, 2017, Toshiba announced that it intends to close the sale of all shares of TMC to K.K. Pangea, a special purpose acquisition company formed by a consortium led by Bain Capital Private Equity, L.P., as soon as possible. This latest round of investment is for equipment that falls within the scope of the FY2017 investment plan and placement of orders this year will secure timely installation. This investment will not impact on the sale of TMC’s shares.