PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Following the latest reports suggesting the firm will exit the computer market, Toshiba has confirmed its B2B PC business will stay.
According to Tech4Gamers, Toshiba will retire from the computing business on March 31st and from that day, all its commercial offices, including the US, Europe and Latin America will be closed
This comes after the tech firm revealed its ‘revitalisation plans’ at the end of last year, after closing 2015 with a loss of $4,500 million and axing 7,000 jobs.
PCR reached out to Toshiba to try and confirm the PC market exit. Here’s what we got:
“Following a series of announcements regarding its corporate revitalisation plans in December, Toshiba wishes to confirm that we will continue our B2B PC business within Europe as part of a plan to focus on this profitable and sustainable area of the market as a core business globally. We will position Europe as an important market and continue its emphasis as a base of B2B and IoT solution businesses.”
So it seems Toshiba will not be disappearing completely from the European PC market, and we may even see more IoT solutions from the firm in the future.
Toshiba will still be selling consumer PCs in the US and Japan.
2015 wasn’t a great year for Toshiba. According to Canalys, the tech firm sold 2.8 million notebooks in EMEA during 2015 – a 38 per cent decline on 2014.
In May, the firm announced that it would be investigating issues surrounding accounting practices within its PC, semi-conductor and TV businesses. It set up a third-party Independent Investigation Committee to correct past financial results, which it expected may have been overstated by 50 billion yen (£264 million) or more, between its fiscal years 2011 and 2013.
Two months later, in July 2015, Toshiba’s chief executive and president Hisao Tanaka resigned from his post, following the news the company did in fact overstate its profits.
On Toshiba’s website, a ‘message from the President’ can be found from new CEO Masashi Muromachi, commenting: “Toshiba Corporation expresses sincere apologies to our shareholders, customers, business partners and all other stakeholders for any concern or inconvenience caused by issues relating to the appropriateness of its accounting.
“Following the September 30 Extraordinary General Meeting of the shareholders, Toshiba now has a new management team in place. Our immediate aims are to regain trust and revitalise the company.”
