Toshiba said Tuesday that it posted a net loss of ¥52.14 billion ($344 million) for the six months through September due to losses related to its chip affiliate Kioxia, marking its last earnings announcement before its scheduled delisting next month.

The figure in the reporting period is a reversal from a net profit of ¥100.66 billion the Japanese conglomerate booked a year earlier. Sales fell 6.1% to ¥1.50 trillion as its hard disk business slowed.

Toshiba said it is considering whether to release earnings results after it delists from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Dec. 20.

The red ink came as Toshiba posted a loss of about ¥100 billion linked to its 40% stake in Kioxia, which has been struggling with a weakening demand for flash memory chips.

In a separate release the same day, the semiconductor manufacturer said it logged a record net loss of ¥189.1 billion for the April-September period.

Toshiba Memory executives unveil the Kioxia logo in September 2019.
Toshiba Memory executives unveil the Kioxia logo in September 2019. | Kyodo

The Japanese chipmaker, which had been seeking to integrate operations with its U.S. peer Western Digital, halted merger talks last month after they found it difficult to gain approval from South Korea's SK Hynix, a major investor in Kioxia, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Toshiba, however, maintained its earnings forecast for the year ending March, projecting its operating profit to decrease 0.5% from the previous year to ¥110 billion on sales of ¥3.2 trillion, down 4.8%.

A consortium led by Japan Industrial Partners succeeded in the ¥2 trillion takeover bid for Toshiba in September, paving the way for the troubled conglomerate to end its 74-year-long history as a public company and rebuild itself as a private firm.

Toshiba had been struggling to recover from a spate of problems in the 2010s, ranging from the overstatement of profits in financial filings to massive losses in its U.S. nuclear business.