Once a leading PC manufacturer, Toshiba formally divested its remaining stake in the laptop business to Sharp and finally leaving the highly-competitive industry after 35 years.
The Japanese conglomerate announced last week that it has transferred the remaining 19.9% shares in Dynabook Inc. that it previously held from Sharp Corporation two years ago.
As a result of the transfer of shares, Dynabook has now become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp, the company said in a short statement.
Sharp bought the Japanese firm’s subsidiary in 2018
The Foxconn-owned Sharp Corporation reached a purchase agreement amounting to $36 million to acquire an 80.1% stake in the Toshiba-subsidiary in the personal computing business Toshiba Client Services Co. Ltd. (TCS) in June 2018.
The transfer was closed in October 2018 and TCS changed its name into Dynabook in January 2019.
Under the terms of a June 2018 share purchase agreement between Toshiba and Sharp, the Japanese firm transferred to Sharp 80.1% of the outstanding shares of TCS, then a wholly-owned subsidiary in the personal computer business.
Last June 30, under the terms of the share purchase agreement, Sharp exercised a call option for the remaining outstanding shares of Dynabook held by Toshiba.
Sharp has left the PC manufacturing industry in 2010 but re-entered the PC game when it bought Dynabook as it aimed to take advantage of its parent company Foxconn’s factories in China in producing personal computers more cheaply.
Toshiba used to be a leading PC manufacturer
Toshiba has been known as a leading computer manufacturing firm in the world releasing the Toshiba T1100 in 1985 as the world’s first mass-market laptop computer.
Without any hard drive, the Toshiba T1100 which sold a $1,899 has a monochrome LCD and uses a 3.5-inch floppy disk to boot using a 4.77 MHz Intel CPU and with 256 kilobytes of RAM.
During its peak in 2011, the Japanese company sold 17.7 million personal computers annually but soon fell to only 1.4 million units back in 2017, according to Reuters.
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