Toshiba, the giant Japanese conglomerate that had a huge presence in the laptop market officially quit the business yesterday.
In a rather brief press release, the company says they have transferred their shares in Dynabook to Sharp. Toshiba says they have transferred the 19.9% of the outstanding shares in Dynabook which makes the latter a wholly owned subsidiary of Sharp.
“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,” Toshiba says.
In June 2018, Toshiba transferred 80.1% of outstanding shares of Toshiba Client Solutions Co Ltd (TCS) which was their wholly owned subsidiary in the PC business. TCS changed its name to Dynabook in January 2019.
This announcement is an end to Toshiba’s 35 years in the laptop business. They made their first laptop in 1985 which was called the T1100. It had a 3.5 inch floppy drive, 256k of memory and rechargeable batteries.
The company was really successful in the 90s and early 200s where they were among the top PC manufacturers. Their Satellite range was a workhorse and the Protégé range were small workhorses and they made Toshiba lead the market share during this time.
Toshibas were so popular in Kenya too. There was a time you could easily get a Toshiba laptop in Kenya and people would prefer them over HPs and Dells. I used to own a Tecra and I loved its features like a fingerprint scanner, trackpad plus its numerous accessories like ethernet cables, phone lines and a laptop case, which is unheard of in today’s world.
However as the PC market contracted, Dell and HP dominated PC sales in the 2010s. The company ended up selling 80.1% of their laptop business to Sharp for only $36 million, a pittance of what it used to be before.
