Toshiba is officially out of laptop business, sells remaining 19.9% stake

Toshiba, a Japanese tech giant has exited laptop business by selling off its remaining 19.9% stakes in Dynabook to Sharp. The company had already sold 80.1% shares of its PC business to Sharp in 2018 for USD 36 million.

After giving away 80.1% shares, Sharp renamed the PC division to Dynabook and later in June it exercised its rights to buy remaining 19.9% shares. 

On August 4, 2020 Toshiba released a statement and informed that the deal with Sharp has completed and Sharp is the sole owner of Dynabook.

During 1900s and 2000s, Toshiba was key player in portable computer market and its T1100, a $2,000 laptop was launched in 1985, which marked their entry into this space. T1100 was instant hit and it became standards for many laptops until the launch of Apple’s PowerBook.

It had three successful lines of products: Satellite, Portege and Qosmio, which thrived in the market for many years until late 2000s.

What went wrong with Toshiba?

As years passed, once pioneer in portable computers now was not able to keep up with the market and was already losing its touch. Along with this, rivals like Apple, Dell, Acer and Lenovo had already got the strong grip on the portable computer market beating it at its own game. 

With shrinking market and stiff competition from the rivals which now controls large portion of the market, the company was finding it difficult to survive and was also losing popularity. 

As per Reuters, Toshiba’s portable computer division had sold as much as 17.7 million units in 2011 and by the year 2017 the number had reduced down to meagre 1.4 million. 

Toshiba is still a strong brand in computing business with its footing in printing and storage business. It also has stakes in energy and retail business.