东芝

Toshiba's Chinese name 东芝 (Dōng zhī) directly reads the Japanese characters 東芝 (Toshiba): 東/东 means 'east' and 芝 means 'sesame/auspicious plant'. The company was founded in 1939 through a merger of Tokyo Denki (Tokyo Electric) and Shibaura Seisakusho — 'Toshiba' is a portmanteau of the first characters of each predecessor company.

Character-by-character pronunciation

东芝 uses 2 characters to represent the brand name in Chinese. Each character contributes to the phonetic or semantic rendering.