The first thing that comes to our mind when we hear the word Toshiba is nostalgia and the feeling of how we used to use their products in our childhood. Most people born in the 1990s would have used at least one product in the laptop or PC industry made by Toshiba. So big was the brand back then that the likes of Asus and others were not even around and Toshiba along with Dell, HP, and Acer was running the PC business. However, we are here to report that Toshiba has officially stopped making new laptops and this marks the end of an era.
The company which used to be a pioneer in making laptops as well as desktops sold the last remaining part of its PC business to another giant Sharp marking their departure from the PC business. In 2018, Toshiba had already sold a majority of their PC business to Sharp for $36 million which was an 80.1% stake at that time. Now, the remaining 19.9% stake has also been sold and the deal was done back in June but has been completed on August 4 as announced by Toshiba.
Toshiba has also revealed in their statement that “As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp,”. At its peak in the early 2010s, Toshiba had a market share in the PC market of 17.7 million PCs sold in a year but that declined to just 1.4 million in the year 2017. It was obvious that more players coming to the market did not help Toshiba but the company is also to be blamed for not innovating and providing features that people cared about.
Not just Toshiba, this same story can be said about the likes of Sony or HTC or Blackberry in the smartphone industry who failed to p[provide value-for-money smartphones since the competition increased and continued to offer significantly higher priced products compared to others and lost market share.
