September 20, 2007 – Toshiba Corp. is selling its initial headquarters in Tokyo’s Ginza district for 161 billion yen (US ~$1.4 billion), in order to support its investment in new chip business with Sony, according to Japanese media reports.

The Ginza Toshiba Building, a major commercial complex in Ginza housing tenants including Hankyu Department Stores, was opened in 1939 as the first headquarters of Toshiba, which had been created through the merger of Shibaura Seisakusho and Tokyo Denki. A unit of Tokyo Land Corp. will buy the unit, to tear down the current 40,000 sq. m building on 3700 sq. m of land, in order to build “a large multipurpose building,” notes the Nikkei Business Daily and Nikkei Daily.

Toshiba will reportedly net about 130B yen ($1.13B) from the sale, which it likely will use to help support its purchase of system chip fabrication lines at Sony Semiconductor Kyushu Corp.’s Nagasaki Technology Center in Isahaya, southwestern Japan, which will likely include the Cell microprocessor as well as image-processing chips. The two firms are reportedly hammering out terms of a joint venture (majority owned by Toshiba) that would use the lines to fabricate system chips, with Sony the primary product buyer.