Toshiba Agrees To Sell Its PC Business To Sharp For $36 Million
Toshiba will sell its PC business to Sharp, according to a Reuters report, just two years after Foxconn acquired Sharp itself.
Toshiba Exits The PC Market
Toshiba was the first company to launch a notebook PC in 1985 and at one point was able to sell over 17 million PCs a year. However, as the PC market slowed down due to people spending their money on upgrading their smartphones instead of their computers, Toshiba’s sales have dropped to only 1.4 million units a year.
It hasn’t helped that Toshiba had to file bankruptcy for its nuclear power division, Westinghouse Electric, which lost $9 billion in nuclear reactor contracts. This has put pressure on Toshiba to sell other parts of its business, such as its memory and PC units.
Toshiba was able to sell the PC unit to Sharp for only $36 million, which hardly seems like enough to pay lawyers for the merger papers.
A New Beginning For The PC Unit
Sharp hopes to turn Toshiba’s PC business around by focusing on producing computers more cheaply by taking advantage of Foxconn’s manufacturing expertise. Sharp has already achieved some success in rejuvenating its failing TV business by using this strategy.
Foxconn’s leadership also seems to have brought more discipline to Sharp’s spending habits, which led to Sharp’s first profitable quarter after eight consecutive quarters of losses. This discipline may come in handy when Sharp attempts to rebuild Toshiba’s former PC unit. However, it’s not all been positive news at Sharp. The company also lost many executives and employees after the acquisition by Foxconn, and the same may happen at Toshiba’s former PC division as well.
Signaling confidence in its ability to rebuild Toshiba's former PC business, Sharp issued $1.8 billion in new shares to buy back preferred stock from banks. Sharp is expected to finish the acquisition on October 1.
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Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers software news and the issues surrounding privacy and security.
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rwinches They never regained their glory after being banned for selling submarine sound deadening tech to the Russians.Reply -
vern72 It's the end of an era. What a shame. I owned two of their laptops and they were fairly good. I just didn't like the lack of options in their BIOS.Reply -
punkncat I have a Toshiba Satellite that is approaching 10 and has and continues to be outstanding for what I use it for. I only recently had to replace the battery. Been a good one.Reply -
Reynod Back in the day their laptops were outstanding ... the early A100 series laptops were bulletproof. The M400's were good, and I still have a Protege 700 running. Then they went downhill. All good things end.Reply -
velocityg4 Although I haven't set one up in a while. Any Toshiba I set up for a client always had way more bloatware than you normally see, killing performance. They also load on many superfluous utilities which duplicate OS functions. Their products have just been garbage.Reply -
punkncat Reply21033109 said:Although I haven't set one up in a while. Any Toshiba I set up for a client always had way more bloatware than you normally see, killing performance. They also load on many superfluous utilities which duplicate OS functions. Their products have just been garbage.
I have NEVER purchased a computer that I didn't reformat (after I learned how) or at least spend a while to go through and disable most/all of that. I found, particularly in Toshiba's case, that almost everything in there was a duplicate of something Windows already did. I did always enjoy the "Eco mode" though.
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velocityg4 Reply21033184 said:21033109 said:Although I haven't set one up in a while. Any Toshiba I set up for a client always had way more bloatware than you normally see, killing performance. They also load on many superfluous utilities which duplicate OS functions. Their products have just been garbage.
I have NEVER purchased a computer that I didn't reformat (after I learned how) or at least spend a while to go through and disable most/all of that. I found, particularly in Toshiba's case, that almost everything in there was a duplicate of something Windows already did. I did always enjoy the "Eco mode" though.
Unfortunately most people aren't willing to pay for the additional time spent on a Vanilla reinstall of Windows. So, I just clean out the bloatware. Since I build all my desktop computers this hasn't been an issue for me. All my laptops have been freebies from clients tossing still decent laptops. Which got a clean install.