Toshiba Shares Plummet After Warning of 'Billions' in Losses (cnn.com)

Toshiba's troubles keep piling up. From a report on CNN Money: The Japanese firm's shares plunged 20% on Wednesday, after the company warned it is expecting billions of dollars in losses from its takeover of a U.S. nuclear construction business last year. "We're still figuring out the exact numbers, but it could reach up to several hundred billion yen," CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa told reporters Tuesday. Toshiba's U.S. nuclear-power subsidiary Westinghouse acquired CB&I Stone & Webster late last year, when Toshiba was still struggling to recover from a $1.2 billion accounting scandal. Toshiba's shares dived in the months following that scandal, which led to a major management reshuffle after the Japanese conglomerate admitted it had doctored financial results for years. The company reported a loss of 460 billion yen ($3.9 billion) for 2015.

Comments

this should have been a huge red flag.

[nimbius]

shale gas based power plants and renewables have absolutely crushed industries like nuclear in the last 10 years. Toshiba was utterly foolish to make this purchase without considering the fact that nuclear power plants are inexorably more expensive to build, maintain, and operate than other energy systems. nuclear plants spend months offline for maintenance and reconditioning, and take months more to fully go online. Not to mention the fact that a failure at a gas power plant is generally not going to render the surrounding states uninhabitable for a thousand years.