Toshiba, the embattled Japanese conglomerate, said yesterday that it needed more time to choose an outside investor for its microchip business, extending a period of uncertainty for the company as it seeks a multibillion-dollar cash infusion to stabilize its finances, the New York Times reported. Toshiba has veered among competing offers to buy a portion of the profitable chip unit. That business is the second-largest producer of so-called NAND flash memory chips, which are used to store data in smartphones and other digital devices. (Samsung Electronics of South Korea is the biggest.) It was the second time that Toshiba missed a self-imposed deadline to complete a deal for the business, which analysts say could be worth upward of 2 trillion yen, or around $18 billion. Toshiba needs the money that a sale would bring in to fill a hole in its balance sheet left by steep losses on nuclear power projects in the United States.
