Japan electronics company Toshiba Corp. said Tuesday British private equity company CVC Capital Partners has suspended a buyout offer for the Japan company, Toshiba said in a statement on its website.
CVC will "step aside to await your guidance as to whether a privatization of Toshiba will suit management's and the board of directors' strategic objectives," Toshiba quoted the British company saying in a letter.
CVC made a preliminary buyout offer April 6, a deal that was estimated at more than 2 trillion yen ($18 billion).
Earlier in April CVC delayed submitting a formal proposal to buy Toshiba following the appointment of a new chief executive officer by the industrial group, according to news reports.
CVC believes Toshiba's new leadership will need time to settle in before it can make any decisions on a potential buyout, the report said. Toshiba and CVC didn't immediately respond to requests for comment at the time.
Earlier this week, Toshiba chief executive Nobuaki Kurumatani resigned over the $20 billion buyout bid.
Satoshi Tsunakawa, who led the company before Kurumatani and until Wednesday was chairperson, took over the job.
Kurumatani, the chief executive for three years, had been under fire over the bid from CVC - his former employer. He was also facing allegations that investors were pressured before a shareholder meeting to support desired board nominations.
U.S-listed shares of Toshiba fell 6% following the report.
Private equity company KKR & Co. has been mentioned as a possible bidder, along with Canada's Brookfield Asset Management, according to news reports.
A representative for KKR Japan declined to comment. Brookfield did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
Toshiba makes power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors, hard disk drives, printers, batteries, lighting, as well as IT goods and services such as quantum cryptography.
It was one of the biggest manufacturers of personal computers, consumer electronics, home appliances and medical equipment. As a semiconductor company and the inventor of flash memory, Toshiba had been one of the Top 10 in the chip industry until its flash memory unit was spun off as Toshiba Memory, later Kioxia, in the late 2010s.
