Toshiba's laptop business shuffles off this mortal coil
In from the min-1990s, right through into the early years of the new millennium, Toshiba churned out some pretty solid laptop hardware. I've used a number of their lappy's in the past, across various industries. No matter what I threw at them, be it text, Photoshop, or a bit of gaming when the boss wasn't looking, Toshiba's hardware always proved capable of standing its ground.
In recent years, Toshiba's taken a number of quiet steps away from their laptop business. This week, however, they dropped everything and ran like like hell from it: In a less-than-well-publicized press release, Toshiba announced that what little they had left to do with making laptops has been handed over to other, more interested companies.
TOKYO-Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) hereby announces that it has transferred the 19.9% of the outstanding shares in Dynabook Inc. that it held to Sharp Corporation. As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp.
Under the terms of a June 2018 share purchase agreement between Toshiba and Sharp, Toshiba transferred to Sharp 80.1% of the outstanding shares of Toshiba Client Solutions Co., Ltd (hereinafter TCS), then Toshiba's wholly-owned subsidiary in the personal computer business. That transfer closed in October 2018, and TCS changed 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.
So, That's that: a little less selection in an already underwhelming number of companies aspiring to meet our computing needs.
Image via Flickr, courtesy of Cheon Fong Liew