Toshiba, Vaio and Fujitsu will reportedly be merging in a bid to save the dwindling PC industry, Bloomberg reports.
Sales in the PC world have gone down drastically and as this continues to happen, the number of players in the same field also keeps growing down. Major companies that dealt with PC manufacturing are breaking apart, with some focusing more on the mobile world. Some have even gone out of business, but others think of smarter, better ways to stay relevant in the market.
Such smart thinkers in the current PC world are Toshiba, Vaio and Fujitsu. These three want to join forces before everything turns to ashes and instead, come in with the largest PC Company in the world.
According to words coming from the CEO of the company that owns Vaio, Hidemi Moue, this deal is in the making and if all goes well, word about it will be official by the time March comes to a conclusion. This is, of course, subject to all three parties agreeing on terms of the deal. Whether any of the three names will be retained on the new products to be made by the companies, or not, is still unknown.
Sony parted ways with Vaio in 2014 and barely two years later, there is word that the company wants to merge with others. While it is true to say that Toshiba and Fujitsu have had enough time to test the waters, Vaio has barely done this. Nonetheless, the company’s line of PCs hasn’t seen any major success ever since this spin-off took place.
Even though Toshiba and Fujitsu have other business areas, they haven’t been doing well in the market either. The former had to lay off thousands of employees towards the end of last year, but it declined reports that it was set to exit the PC market. The case is the same for Fujitsu, especially having found it quite impossible to impress outside Asia. Maybe combining forces will help these three companies compete against the likes of Lenovo, which currently dominates local Japanese markets.
As people grow less dependent on desktops and PCs in general, there will definitely be more of these mergers to come. To make matters worse for the PC industry, the more than capable smartphones and tablets are available for prices that are far much cheaper than what it would cost to get a decent desktop or laptop. These devices also come in on a frequent basis, meaning users are exposed to new software, hardware, features and specs every now and then, something that might take quite some time before happening on PCs.
If Toshiba, Vaio and Fujitsu are thinking that a merger would help reverse the current dependence on smartphones, they’d better scrap off this deal.