Toshiba Memory Corp., the world's second-largest maker of NAND flash memory chips, plans to move up an initial public offering and go public as soon as next autumn, sources close to the matter said Wednesday.
The consortium led by U.S. private equity fund Bain Capital, which bought Toshiba Corp.'s prized semiconductor unit for ¥2 trillion ($17.8 billion) in June, had said in October last year that it aimed to list the unit on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in about three years.
The consortium, whose members include South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc. and Japanese optical glass-maker Hoya Corp., has decided to speed up the schedule to recoup the money spent to acquire Toshiba Memory, and to raise funds to strengthen the chip's competitiveness against industry leader Samsung Electronics Co., they said.