Toshiba, Vaio, Fujitsu said to be considering laptop PC merger

Toshiba, Fujitsu and Vaio were not immediately available for comment outside regular business hours. Vaio spun off from Sony in 2014, and just recently entered the United States market with the high-end Vaio Canvas Z tablet.

The report noted that Vaio would likely be the surviving company, with the other two making investments and transferring their operations to the combined entity.

Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sony spin-off Vaio are in talks to merge their personal computer businesses amidst increasing specialisation of Japanese electronics firms.

Toshiba, Fujitsu and Vaio are considering a merger of their laptop PC businesses, according to a Japanese media report. Reaching a conclusion over the integration will likely be carried over to next year, the observers said.

Though the envisaged joint venture would rank seventh globally, Toshiba and Fujitsu apparently judged that they would be able to boost competitiveness by focusing on PCs for corporate use.

Toshiba’s notebook PCs, including its well-known Dynabook series, had the highest share in the global market in the late 1990s.

Toshiba’s PC division became one hotbed of its accounting irregularities. Fujitsu itself announced plans to spin off its PC unit earlier this year; in a statement to the WSJ today, it said it has not made any decisions about what it will do. The talks could mark Toshiba’s third divestment this year, following the sale of its image sensor unit in November and the splitting of its chip business in October. Some of the reported manufacturers are said to be non-Japanese companies. While investigators did not find evidence that Tanaka had ordered staff to inflate sales figures, they criticized company culture, stating that Toshiba’s workers “could not go against the wishes of superiors”.