Toshiba Corp may lay off staff in its underperforming home appliances, TV and PC businesses and seek a partner for its nuclear operations to overhaul the company after a $1.3 billion accounting scandal, its chief executive said.<br />We must urgently take action in these businesses," chief executive Masashi Muromachi told a roundtable of reporters.<br />Muromachi said that the restructuring steps may temporarily hurt the company's capital base, already weak compared with rivals such as Hitachi Ltd.<br />"The environment for the nuclear business is tough in Japan, and we need to address various issues to meet revised US regulatory rules," he said.<br />Analysts have long speculated that the value of assets and goodwill related to Toshiba's 87% stake in US nuclear unit Westinghouse Electric has been overstated, though the company has insisted that there is no need for a writedown at least for now.
