Electronics giant Sony has announced that it will be exiting the PC industry and sell its Vaio PC business to Japan Industrial Partners (JIP).
The agreement is yet to be finalised, but the two companies expect to have worked out all the terms by the end of March. Until then Sony “will cease planning, design, and development of PC products”, with manufacturing and sales discontinued after the upcoming Spring 2014 lineup launch.
JIP has said that they will focus on expanding consumer PC sales within Japan, although they have not ruled out the possibility of international expansion at a later date.
Current Vaio owners around the world are not being left in the lurch, however, and will be able to find support from either Sony or JIP.
Sony’s decision comes after two years of continuous decline in the PC industry, with only Lenovo, who bought IBM’s ThinkPad PC division in 2005, posting market share and sales volume increases. Even Apple, which has previously bucked the trend of decline, has started to see PC sales numbers fall.
Consumers are now performing many of the tasks for which they previously needed a PC on their tablets or smartphones, with incremental PC performance improvements less important to how people interact with the digital world than ever before.
As Sony looks to increase its marketshare in the smartphone and tablet spaces, with its impressive Z-series Android devices, the Vaio PC business looks like a relic of a previous era, and selling it to try and push the larger conglomerate back towards profitability makes sense.