(Mainichi Japan)
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Struggling Toshiba Corp. said Wednesday it is selling its professional basketball team the Kawasaki Brave Thunders to mobile service provider DeNA Co. for a nominal sum.
Toshiba said in a press release that sale of the basketball team to DeNA, which owns the Yokohama BayStars professional baseball team, will enable players to continue to thrive, adding that the company will keep supporting its amateur Brave Lupus rugby team and Brave Areus baseball team.
"We have been studying ways for (Kawasaki) to continue to develop as a professional team," Masayasu Toyohara, Toshiba's senior vice president, told a joint press conference with DeNA.
"We thought it would be best for the team to be operated by DeNA, which has knowledge about managing a professional sports team," Toyohara said.
The Kawasaki Brave Thunders, the runners-up in the newly formed B-League's 2016-2017 season, had a net worth of 3 million yen ($27,000) as of March 2017.
DeNA has agreed to pay the team's net worth as of July 1, when the ownership transfer is scheduled to be finalized, Toshiba said.
Shingo Okamura, the head of the sports business unit at DeNA, said, "It is a team with a very long history and it is our pleasure to be able to manage it."
Toshiba is undergoing drastic restructuring following huge losses by its U.S. nuclear business.
The conglomerate recently agreed to sell its profitable memory chip business to a consortium led by U.S. investment fund Bain Capital for 2 trillion yen and its TV business to China's Hisense Group for around 12.9 billion yen.
Toshiba is also moving to slash advertising spending by ending its decades-long sponsorship of the popular Japanese cartoon show "Sazae-san" and removing its corporate logo from a display overlooking New York's Times Square, according to sources familiar with the matter.