Tokyo- Toshiba Corp. decided at a board meeting on Wednesday to grant a Japan-US-South Korea consortium the preferential right to negotiate for its flash memory unit, Toshiba Memory Corp.

The struggling Japanese electronics and machinery maker said it will aim to conclude a contract with the consortium before a general meeting of Toshiba's shareholders on June 28 and complete the unit's sale by the end of March 2018.

Toshiba split the lucrative memory business from itself for sale with the aim of securing funds to resolve its negative net worth caused by huge losses from its US nuclear power business.

The consortium is led by Japanese members--government-backed investment fund Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, the state-held Development Bank of Japan and private-sector firms, which are set to provide a majority of the funds to buy the unit together. The team is joined by US investment firm Bain Capital and South Korean semiconductor maker SK Hynix Inc.

The Japanese industry ministry took the lead in organizing the consortium out of concern about possible outflows of jobs and technologies.

The team has offered to buy the chip unit for some 2 trillion yen.

"Toshiba has determined that the consortium has presented the best proposal, not only in terms of valuation, but also in respect to certainty of closing, retention of employees and maintenance of sensitive technology within Japan," the company said in a statement.

Japanese industry minister Hiroshige Seko told reporters that he welcomes the day's decision by Toshiba. (Jiji Press)