Toshiba quietly left the patch company once and for all, ending a 35-year run by transferring its remaining minority stake in its PC business to Sharp. Two years ago, Toshiba sold an 80.1 percent stake in its PC business to Sharp for $ 36 million, and Sharp renamed the Dynabook division. Sharp exercised its right to buy the remaining 19.1 percent of shares in June, and Toshiba issued a statement on August 4 stating that the deal was complete.
“As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a subsidiary of Sharp,” Toshiba said in a statement.
The company made its first PC laptop in 1985: the T1100 boasts internal rechargeable batteries, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and 256K memory. ComputerWorld’s 20-year retrospective of the T1100 notes that Toshiba executives were unsure about the laptop, but eventually came around, and began selling the T1100 for about $ 2,000.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Toshiba was one of the top PC manufacturers, but as more players entered the market and offered less unique features, Toshiba’s laptops declined in popularity. By the time it sold its stake to Sharp, Toshiba’s share of the PC market had declined from its 2011 peak of 17.7 million PCs to about 1.4 million in 2017, according to Reuters.
