TOSHIBA PHASED OUT THE PRODUCTION OF LAPTOPS

Toshiba Corporation has announced that it will no longer produce laptops. The Client Solutions division, ​​the 19.9% stake of which had remained a part of the company until recently, giving the consumer a sense of the brand's presence in the market, was sold to Sharp on June 30. The previous deal to sell the shares of the same company (80.1%) took place in 2018. And two years earlier, Toshiba laptops left Europe.

It is curious that Toshiba is leaving the market that was actually once created by the company itself. After all, the first laptop released on the market back in 1985 was created by Toshiba. It was the T1100, equipped with 256 kilobytes of RAM. It is quite understandable that the current farewell of the corporation to the market is perceived by many users with considerable nostalgia.

Over the past decade, Toshiba's sales have declined significantly.

Their release under the Dynabook brand (which has been known since 1989 exclusively in Japan) practically did not affect the foreign markets. In terms of sales, the company moved to the margins of the market, giving the way t to the Dell, HP and Lenovo brands.

Whether Sharp Company will now be able to overtake the competitors and increase the production of devices in all regions where its products are available is not yet clear. The computer market experts are talking about the possible decline of the era of laptops. Consumers will no longer see the Satellite, Portégé or Qosmio line of mobile PCs, thanks to which the corporation had been known throughout the world 10 years ago.

The experts point out that the brand's exit from the market was a foregone conclusion a decade ago.

Competitors who have relied on the production of ultrabooks have bypassed Toshiba. The companies that were able to protect price and scale (Dell, Lenovo) or popularize a premium brand (Apple) have succeeded as well. If in 2011 the sales of computers included 17 million units, then in 2017, they barely exceeded one tenth of this figure (about 1.9 million). A loss of $ 318 million, which the corporation suffered in 2015, led to the dismissal of the company's top management, who left the office amid a financial scandal. The auditors then discovered a systematic overstatement of profits.

Recently, the consumer demand for laptops has slightly increased. The experts attribute this to the pandemic and the transition of many specialists to "remote work". It is possible that Sharp can take an advantage of the situation and return the former Toshiba division to its former profitable days.

However, one can hardly hope to make significant profits solely from the laptop sales.

Toshiba, having terminated the production of computers, can now fully focus on the storage systems, industrial electronics and discrete components, in the production of which the corporation continues to be one of the world leaders.