Bain Capital is on track to pocket roughly $15B in profits from its 2018 acquisition of Kioxia, the former Toshiba Memory unit. That would make it one of the most lucrative leveraged buyouts in history, period.
The US private equity giant led a consortium that bought Toshiba’s memory chip business for approximately $18B in June 2018. At the time, it was the largest LBO in Asian history.
From Toshiba castoff to $75B juggernaut
Kioxia, the company that literally invented NAND flash memory technology back in 1987, went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on December 18, 2024. Its initial market capitalization came in above $5B.
Surging demand for data storage solutions, powered by the insatiable appetite of AI training and inference workloads, sent Kioxia’s stock soaring. The company’s valuation ballooned to an estimated $75B at its peak. That’s roughly a 10x increase from its IPO market cap.
