Back in 2018 Toshiba sold an 80.1 percent stake of its PC business to Sharp for $36 million, and Sharp renamed the division Dynabook. That deal also gave Sharp the right to buy the remaining 19.1 percent of those shares and it exercised that right in June. Toshiba has now released a statement saying that the deal has been completed.
“As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Sharp,” Toshiba said in a statement.
Toshiba made its first PC laptop in 1985 and that device, the T1100, came with internal rechargeable batteries, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and 256K of memory.
Over the past thirty years Toshiba had remained among the top PC manufacturers, but as the market became more competitive, a failure to differentiate its products saw the company's laptops wane in popularity.
In fact in 2016, it ceased manufacturing consumer laptops for the European market, focusing only on hardware for businesses and by the time it sold its stake to Sharp, Toshiba’s share of the PC market had fallen from a 2011 peak of 17.7 million PCs sold, according to Reuters, to just over 1.4 million in 2017.
Toshiba's decision comes at a time when consumer demand for laptops has soared due to the Coronavirus pandemic which has seen a growing number of people looking to work from home due to global lockdowns.
The market for personal computers, however, has been a tough one for some time and, according to analyst Marina Koytcheva from the firm CCS Insight, "Only those who have managed to sustain scale and price (like Lenovo), or have a premium brand (like Apple) have succeeded in the unforgiving PC market, where volumes have been falling for years.".
