TOKYO (BLOOMBERG) – Toshiba Corp confirmed that it received an initial buyout offer from CVC Capital Partners and said it would seek more information as it weighs the proposal.

The Japanese conglomerate issued the statement after reports about a possible agreement. The Japanese company’s board plans to meet on Wednesday (Ap[ril 7) to discuss the potential deal, one person familiar with the matter said.

Shares of Toshiba have risen 33 per cent in Japanese trading this year, giving the company a market value of 1.74 trillion yen (S$21.2 billion). The company’s ADRs rose 22 per cent in US trading on Tuesday, the most on record.

Private equity firms have announced US$15.1 billion (S$20.2 billion) of deals targeting Japanese firms over the past 12 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Nikkei reported earlier that CVC plans to propose a deal to take Toshiba private through a tender offer that could be worth more than US$20 billion. A formal proposal may be unveiled as soon as Wednesday, according to the newspaper.

Toshiba chief executive officer Nobuaki Kurumatani was a senior executive at CVC before joining Toshiba in 2018 as the first outsider to lead the company in more than 50 years. Since then, he has been trying to regain investor confidence after Toshiba was battered by accounting scandals and record losses.

Toshiba, once synonymous with the global ascent of corporate Japan, had been forced to sell its crown-jewel memory-chip business to avoid being delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange. More recently, Toshiba investors passed a resolution backing an overseas hedge fund’s call to investigate voting at its last annual general meeting, heaping further pressure on the Toshiba board.