Toshiba could post as much as $1 billion in losses this year after deciding to throw in the towel and shut down all its various business projects relating to the HD DVD format. Toshiba was the proposed standard’s chief proponent in competition with Sony’s Blu-ray Disc.
According to the Japanese business daily Nikkei, Toshiba Corp. is preparing in a worst-case scenario to see losses approaching more than $985 million. The newspaper quoted anonymous sources, while Toshiba would neither confirm nor deny the numbers—saying only that Toshiba is now in the process of assessing “possible losses” at this time.
Toshiba plans to stop selling its HD DVD players machines by the end of this month, and virtually all new HD DVD packaged content from all sources will slow to a trickle later this spring. Beyond research and production costs, Toshiba had also spent several million dollars promoting its favored format and its array of related products.
