Foxconn pays £2.5bn to swallow Sharp in cut-price takeover deal Chinese iPhone assembler Foxconn is to swallow Japanese monitor biz Sharp for ¥389bn (£2.5bn) – around £625m less than it had previously been willing to cough up. Under the terms of the deal, Foxconn's daddy Hon Hai will gain a controlling stake of 66 per cent in Sharp. The takeover beat a proposal by the Japanese government …
I remember when Sharp was a respected and sought after brand of everything from televisions to microwave ovens - one of which still sits working in my kitchen. I hope Foxconn's motives are to truly revitalize the Sharp brand and not just gobble up the IP and discard the rest simply for the sake of a profit stream.* [/curmudgeon]
* absolutely NOTHING wrong with seeking profit, IF one does it responsibly.
Obviously Foxconn doesn't just want to be Apple's exploited labour source any more and is looking to move into direct marketing and sales.
Sharp will become the retail arm of Foxconn. It all was forecast, all the OEMs that actual produced all the badged stuff are looking to cut out the middle man and pocket the bulk of the profits that the middle man gets.
So Sharp will expand after years of contraction to supply a full range of Foxconn electronics and Foxconn will be making far more than just Apple mobile products.
"Obviously Foxconn doesn't just want to be Apple's exploited labour source any more and is looking to move into direct marketing and sales."
Foxconn have always been more than Apples bitch. I've certainly seen various PC components with their branding on and no doubt they have many other lines of their own or assembled for other brands. They don't really have the same investment in their brand as a retail arm though. They just want to grow and make more money, whether that be their or any other brand.
How can it all end up like this?
Many Japanese companies have succumbed to the American ideal of business and stopped innovating, caring about quality and offshored their manufacturing. This is the result of and now the ongoing cause of their 20+ year recession.
The English language version of Japanese news websites are full of comments by readers who constantly complain of the corruption and stagnation of the once mighty Japanese business machine, the Zaibatsu.
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Rumors have Apple switching to OLEDs for the iPhone sometime between this fall and fall 2018, but I think they may never do so. They purchased a company called LuxVue last year that was claiming to have solved production problems for inorganic LED displays. If they have cracked that, it would offer greatly reduced power, increased brightness, and much longer lifetime than OLED.
If Apple wanted to keep that technology to themselves, they need someone to manufacture it for them. Enter Foxconn...
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