Toshiba Corporation
Leadership History
4 leaders · 2013 to present
Taro Shimada is the CEO of Toshiba, in the role since 2022. The first chief executive was Hisao Tanaka, from 2013.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taro Shimada | President and CEO | 2022 | Present | 4 |
| Nobuaki Kurumatani | Chief Executive Officer | 2018 | 2021 | 3 |
| Satoshi Tsunakawa | President and Chief Executive Officer | 2016 | 2018 | 2 |
| Hisao Tanaka | President and Chief Executive Officer | 2013 | 2015 | 2 |
Toshiba Corporation is a privately held Japanese industrial company headquartered at 72-34 Horikawa-cho, Kawasaki. It reported FY2025 consolidated net sales of JPY 3,709.1 billion (about $24.7 billion at its average rate of 150 yen per dollar) and had 94,051 employees. Taro Shimada has been President and CEO since 2022. Since December 20, 2023, it has been owned by a consortium led by Japan Industrial Partners (JIP). The company is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
Toshiba sells and services long-lived equipment to utilities, governments, railways, factories and device makers. Energy Systems & Solutions covers transmission and distribution equipment, nuclear and thermal power systems and renewables. Infrastructure Systems & Solutions covers public infrastructure, railway and industrial systems. Electronic Devices & Storage Solutions sells power semiconductors and nearline hard disk drives. Building Solutions, Retail & Printing Solutions (listed subsidiary Toshiba Tec) and Digital Solutions round out the portfolio. Much of the profit comes from maintenance, upgrades and service on its installed base rather than one-off equipment sales. Toshiba also still holds a minority stake in Kioxia, and sales of those shares produced large one-off gains in FY2025 and 2026.
President and CEO
2022 – Present
4 years (current)
Shimada orchestrated the highly controversial $14 billion buyout of Toshiba by a consortium led by Japan Industrial Partners (JIP), officially delisting the company and ending its 74-year public history.
As CEO, he managed the final, chaotic culmination of years of activist investor pressure, effectively taking the massive, scandal-ridden conglomerate private to restructure in secret.
Chief Executive Officer
2018 – 2021
3 years
Kurumatani attempted to fend off aggressive activist investors while managing the massive fallout from the Westinghouse nuclear bankruptcy that nearly destroyed the company.
He was forced to resign as CEO in 2021 following intense backlash over a deeply controversial buyout offer from CVC Capital Partners, his former employer, which shareholders viewed as highly conflicted.
President and Chief Executive Officer
2016 – 2018
2 years
Tsunakawa became president in June 2016 after the accounting scandal and led Toshiba through the bankruptcy of its US nuclear unit Westinghouse in 2017.
He sold the memory chip business to a group led by Bain Capital in 2018. Nobuaki Kurumatani then became chief executive.
President and Chief Executive Officer
2013 – 2015
2 years
Tanaka became president in June 2013.
He resigned in July 2015 after an independent panel found Toshiba had overstated profits by about 152 billion yen over several years.
Toshiba faces project-execution risk, intense industrial competition, restructuring complexity, talent constraints in Japanese engineering, debt and private-ownership pressure after the buyout, and cyclicality in electronic devices.
Taro Shimada serves as President and Chief Executive Officer (Representative Executive Officer) of Toshiba Corporation, having held executive leadership since March 2022 and steering the company through its historic 2023 privatization.
Taro Shimada spent decades in industrial software and automation, serving in senior executive roles at Siemens KK in Japan before joining Toshiba in 2018 as Chief Digital Officer to architect its cyber-physical and IoT strategy.
Shimada negotiated the take-private transaction with JIP, unified the board, launched the May 2024 Revitalization Plan to achieve 10% operating margins, initiated 4,000 workforce reductions, and secured multi-billion dollar Kioxia share sales.
Taizo Ishizaka served as President from 1949 to 1957. Taking over a strike-crippled, near-bankrupt company after World War II, he restructured labor relations, eliminated thousands of redundant jobs, and rebuilt Toshiba into an industrial juggernaut.
Atsutoshi Nishida championed Toshiba's early laptop success, but as CEO orchestrated the fateful $5.4 billion acquisition of Westinghouse Electric in 2006, setting the stage for catastrophic future nuclear writedowns.
Norio Sasaki succeeded Nishida as CEO. Severe boardroom rivalry between Nishida and Sasaki led to intense pressure on division heads to meet impossible financial targets ("the Challenge"), culminating in the $1.2 billion accounting fraud revealed in 2015.
Satoshi Tsunakawa served multiple stints as CEO between 2016 and 2022. He navigated the Westinghouse bankruptcy, engineered the emergency $18 billion sale of the memory-chip unit to Bain Capital, and maintained company solvency.
Nobuaki Kurumatani, a former banker, served as CEO from 2018 to 2021. He faced fierce resistance from activist shareholders, culminating in his resignation following a controversial takeover proposal from private equity firm CVC Capital Partners.
Following delisting in December 2023, Toshiba replaced its fractured activist-dominated board with a collaborative private board chaired by JIP executives alongside CEO Taro Shimada and domestic corporate partner representatives.
Shimada advocates a "digital-meets-infrastructure" philosophy, believing that Toshiba's deep physical engineering must be upgraded with agile software and data services to deliver sustainable, double-digit operating margins.
Executive compensation is strictly aligned with the milestones of the Revitalization Plan: fixed-cost reduction targets, free cash flow generation, debt paydown, and preparation for an eventual public relisting.
Shimada envisions restoring Toshiba's global reputation as Japan's premier engineering innovator, serving as an indispensable backbone for clean power distribution, electrified transport, and secure digital data storage.
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