Toshiba is officially out of the laptop business

The Japan-based technology company, Toshiba, has been in the PC business for about 35 years, but the company has now officially quit the laptop business.

Earlier in 2018, the company had sold 80.1% of its PC business to Sharp for $36 million. Soon after that, Sharp renamed the business to Dynabook. It is being reported that Sharp exercised right to buy the remaining 19.1% shares back in June and the deal was completed on August 4.

Toshiba was a major player and among the first to introduce commercially available laptops in the 1980s. Its T1100 in 1985 was widely considered the first laptop computer. The company thrived with its Satellite, Portégé, and Qosmio laptops during the early 1990s and 2000s.

It’s not certain what prompted Toshiba’s decline, but several factors that might have contributed. It produced media-centric laptops whose main feature became useless once Blu-ray and streaming took over. Rivals like Apple, Dell, and HP also beat Toshiba with the production of ultraportable laptops like the MacBook Air and XPS series.

However, with the shrinking PC market share worldwide, the company was finding it difficult to survive. By the time it sold its stake to Sharp, Toshiba’s share of the PC market had dwindled from its 2011 peak of 17.7 million PCs sold to about 1.4 million in 2017.

Toshiba is still a major name in computing through categories like printing and storage, and it has fingers in categories like energy and retail.