With Toshiba officially out of the Laptop business industry, the Japanese multinational corporation, Sharp now owns what’s left of Toshiba’s computer lineup.
After a 35 year run on the Laptop market, the Japanese’s Toshiba has decided to leave the market and sold all its remaining minority stake in its PC business to Sharp.
Before now, Toshiba was among the top best Laptop manufacturers, where the T1100 from 1985 is widely considered the first mainstream laptop computer. The T1100 salient features include an internal rechargeable battery, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and 256K of memory.
But Toshiba executives were unsure about the portable computer and began selling the T1100 for around $2,000, this was according to ComputerWorld’s 20-year retrospective of the T1100. Toshiba markets did well in the 1990s and 2000s with its Satellite, Portégé, and Qosmio lines.
Although, when Apple’s PowerBook line arrived in 1991, the 1985 T1100 did set a standard design template for portables. However, Toshiba still failed in some markets point, HD DVD and media-centric laptops did not do perfectly.
In 2018, it was reported that Toshiba sold an 80.1 percent stake of its PC business to Sharp for $36 million, which led Sharp to renamed the division Dynabook.
Then on August 4th, Toshiba released a statement on August 4th that the 19.1% deal with Sharp was completed, which means that the company quietly sold its remaining 19.9 percent stake in its Dynabook laptop brand to Sharp.
Well, Toshiba isn’t the first to bow out the laptop business in the country, the company also joined other ranks of Japanese tech giants that have similar stuff, such as Sony who sold its VAIO PC business in 2014.
Toshiba said in a statement “As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp,” Toshiba laptop decline was exclusively conspicuously, from the 2011’s 17.7 million PCs sold to about 1.4 million in 2017.
Well, rivals such as Apple, Dell, and Lenovo were among the major companies to beat Toshiba at its own game with ultraportables like the MacBook Air and XPS series.
Up to date, Toshiba is still a major name in computing through categories like printing and storage. You can still find some of its hands in the energy and retail categories too.
