Laptop industry
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Japanese multinational conglomerate Toshiba Corporation has officially exited the laptop industry last week after the company has transferred its remaining minority to Sharp.

This ends the 35-year service of the company to the laptop industry.

Two years ago, Toshiba sold an 80.1 percent stake of its laptop business to Sharp for $36 million and renamed the division Dynabook.

In June, Sharp bought the remaining 19.1 percent of shares. Toshiba then released a statement on Aug. 4 that the deal was complete.

"Under the terms of the share purchase agreement, Sharp exercised a call option for the remaining outstanding shares of Dynabook held by Toshiba. Toshiba has completed procedures for their transfer," Toshiba said in a statement.

Toshiba in the Laptop Industry

Toshiba first joined the industry in 1985 with its first made laptops. It claims to have been the first to make a mass-market computer.

In the 1990s, the company was producing solid workhorses in the Satelite range and started mobile work with the small, thin, and light Portégé range, according to a report.

With these, Toshiba leads the world for world market share through the late 1990s and retain its position until the 2000s.

Toshiba was often among the top five of all PC vendors. As the years go by, Toshiba devices have become "bland" compared to the always-impressive, ThinkPad, and the MacBook Air.

Dell and HP also improved.

The Register report said that Toshiba did not capture the consumers' imaginations, which did not help growth.

In the 2010s, Lenovo, Dell, and HP have dominated PC sales. Toshiba then became a less likely brand included in the laptop shopping list.

Toshiba to Sharp

In 2018, Sharp Corp. announced its intention to but Toshiba's personal computer business. According to a Reuters report, the company also issued $1.8 billion in new shares to buy back preferred stocks from banks.

The acquisition bought Sharp's return to the PC market it quit eight years ago.

Sharp will use the scale of the parent company, Foxconn, to produce PCs more cheaply. This is just what they did with the manufacturing of TVs.

"Foxconn is a PC contract manufacturer and has a great deal of expertise and production capacity," Hiromi Yamaguchi, senior analyst at Euromonitor International, was quoted in a report.

Yamaguchi said this would prove a further catalyst for more Sharp and Foxconn synergies.

Foxconn

Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd., bought Sharp two years ago.

Sharp posted its first annual net profit in four years. This was mainly driven by cost cuts but also by Foxconn's sales network in China.

Sharp said it was buying back preferred shares. These were issued to banks in return for a financial bailout, seeking to reduce high-interest payments,

Sharp was famous for its high-end TVs and smartphone displays. However, it struggled to compete with other Asian rivals before being bought by Foxconn.

The Osaka-based company is now seeking to get back the Sharp brand's license for TVs in North America, which it previously sold to China's Hisense Group.

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