Giant Japanese multinational conglomerate Toshiba Corporation has announced a transfer of the 19.9% of the outstanding shares in Dynabook Inc. that it held to Sharp Corporation, another Japanese design and electronic manufacturer. This now makes Dynabook a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp Corporation and means Toshiba will no longer be manufacturing laptops.
“Toshiba Corporation hereby announces that it has transferred the 19.9 percent of the outstanding shares in Dynabook that it held to Sharp Corporation. As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp,” the company said in a statement.
Toshiba had transferred 80.1% of the outstanding shares of Toshiba Client Solutions to Sharp in October 2018 that saw it change its name to Dynabook in January 2019. On June 30, 2020, under the terms of the share purchase agreement, Sharp exercised a call option for the remaining outstanding shares of Dynabook held by Toshiba, and Toshiba has completed procedures for their transfer.
Toshiba launched the world’s first laptop PC in 1985 as a new strategy to continue in the PC market. It believed that it would have a popular product if it pursued mobility, smaller size, and power saving to make a portable computer that was fully compatible with standard machines. The company also knew it would be able to take advantage of technologies it had accumulated in the development of Japanese-language word processors.
Its technical innovation enabled them to lead the portable PC market and was also able to make major contributions to the component market. Toshiba was awarded the Okochi Memorial Production Award from the Okochi Memorial Foundation for its cutting edge new technologies in 1989.
According to UK’s Reuters, the Tokyo-based company sold more than 17.7 million PCs in 2011 before the fall in 2015. By 2016, it had ceased making consumer laptops and was only focusing on hardware for businesses.
“Consumer demand for laptops has soared in the last few months because of the Coronavirus pandemic and global lockdowns, but overall, the market for personal computers has been tough for quite a while,” CCS Insight analyst Marina Koytcheva told BBC News.
“Only those who have managed to sustain scale and price (like Lenovo), or have a premium brand (like Apple) have succeeded in the unforgiving PC market, where volumes have been falling for years,” she said.
Toshiba held its Toshiba Group FY2019 Technology Strategy Briefing in November last year where it unveiled a new strategy and technologies that will drive the Group’s progress in the coming years, and its transition to become one of the ‘world’s leading CPS technology’ companies. It announced that it will establish a new wholly-owned subsidiary dedicated to developing a next-generation core system for Toshiba Group.
The tech company said it was going to focus on digital and AI technologies, renewable energy technologies, and technologies supporting new growth businesses with its power electronics and next-generation SCiBTM, which uses new materials to double the capacity of the battery anode in rechargeable batteries.
Read Also: Toshiba Appoints Country Manager to accelerate Toshiba’s sales growth and market share in Kenya.
