Toshiba the giant Japanese laptop maker that has been a huge brand name in the business has officially quit the laptop manufacturing business.
In a press release, the company said that it is done with the business after transferring its shares held at Dynabook to Sharp. In the move, 19.9% of shares were transferred to Sharp from Dynabook, hence making the later a subsidiary of Sharp.
During the press release, Toshiba said, “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.”
It should be remembered that In June of 2018, Toshiba transferred 80.1% of outstanding shares of Toshiba Client Solutions Co Ltd (TCS) that was their wholly-owned subsidiary in the PC business. TCS then changed its name to Dynabook in January of 2019. The company ended up selling 80.1% of its laptop business to Sharp for only $36 million, which drastically reduced its share.
It has been 35 years since Toshiba manufactured its first laptop that was a 3.5 inch flop disk and 256K memory called the T1100.
The company has been successful over the years and the brand name Toshiba was been a name to behold in the laptop world in the ’90s and 2000s.
Today laptop markets are dominated by Lenovo, which as of 2018, had a market share of 23%, followed closely by HP with a market share of 22%. Dell, Apple, Asus, and Acer follow with market shares below 10%.