Toshiba's remaining PC production line assets were acquired by Sharp, officially withdrawing from the PC industry

Recently, Toshiba is announcing its exit from the ranks of the Japanese tech giants in the PC industry, with Sharp now owning the remaining assets of Toshiba's computer product line. Reports claim that Toshiba has quietly sold the remaining 19.9% ​​of its Dynabook laptop brand to Sharp, officially exiting the laptop business and even the entire PC business. The company is no longer a major PC brand (it sold 80.1% of its shares to Sharp in 2018), but this is still the end of a 35-year-long run for the company.

Source: Financial Times

After the transaction between Toshiba and Sharp was completed in 2018, Toshiba renamed its notebook business (Toshiba Client Solutions Co., Ltd, TCS) to Dynabook in January 2019. According to the stock transfer agreement at the time, Sharp exercised its subscription rights for the remaining outstanding shares of Dynabook held by Toshiba on June 30, 2020, and Toshiba has completed its transfer procedures.

Toshiba first launched consumer laptop products in 1985. The first laptop product was the T1100, which was also the world's first laptop. It had a built-in rechargeable battery, LCD display, Microsoft-based BIOS, was based on Intel's 80C88 processor, had 256Kb of memory, and a 640×200 pixel screen.

In the late 1990s, Toshiba once became the world's largest notebook manufacturer and was ranked among the top five PC manufacturers for a long time. However, as other brands launched thinner and more powerful notebook computers, coupled with the shrinking personal computer market, Toshiba was ultimately unable to meet consumer demand and was eliminated from the market.

As Computerworld explains, the company was a pioneer in portable computers. The T1100, introduced in 1985, is widely considered the first mainstream laptop, and it set the design template for portable computers that changed little until the arrival of Apple's PowerBook line in 1991. Toshiba thrived in the 1990s and 2000s with its Satellite, Portégé, and Qosmio product lines—the first of which was the 13.3-inch Satellite in 2002.

It's uncertain what prompted Toshiba's decline, though there are a number of possible factors. Toshiba's failed bet on high-definition DVD didn't help -- it produced media-centric laptops whose primary function became obsolete once Blu-ray and streaming took over. As The Register observes, competitors like Apple, Dell and Lenovo also beat Toshiba at its own game, with products like the MacBook Air and XPS series. Add in a shrinking PC market, and Toshiba faces stiff competition in that market.