Japan conglomerate Toshiba Corporation has officially exited the personal computer and laptop business after a 35-year run. The company sold all its outstanding shares in its laptop manufacturing unit Dynabook.
The company's remaining 19.9 percent stake in Dynabook, also known as Toshiba America Client Solutions, Inc., was purchased by fellow Japan technology company Sharp Corporation. Toshiba renamed its main laptop arm in 2019 a few months after Sharp acquired an 80.1 percent stake. Dynabook is now wholly owned by Sharp.
Toshiba said it had committed to a share-purchase agreement with Sharp over its remaining outstanding shares of Dynabook. Sharp's board exercised its call option to acquire the remaining stake. Toshiba said it had already completed all procedures for the transfer.
Apart from laptops and PCs Toshiba is involved in industries from elevators, electronic components and energy to semiconductors, batteries, information technology and quantum cryptography.
Toshiba entered the PC business in 1985 - making it a pioneer in the industry behind IBM. The company introduced its first product, the T1100, in Europe. It was one of the first laptops to feature an integrated floppy-disk drive. After that the company established a relatively large market share in the international laptop industry - mostly in its home market and in the U.S. The company is credited as the original inventor of flash memory technology.
Around the turn of the century Toshiba started to struggle and reported a series of annual losses thanks to competition from newcomers. In 2015 the company was involved in an accounting scandal in which it admitted to inflating profits by around $2 billion over the preceding seven years.
Toshiba implemented a restructuring that involved cutting workers and changing its overall management structure. It sold less profitable assets such as its image-sensor business, which was bought by Sony. Most recently, the company sold its nuclear power unit in 2018 for $4.6 billion.
