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News Alert: Someone’s Buying Sharp, Or They’re Going Out of Business

igzo-0116One thing is clear — if Sharp doesn’t take one of the two competing offers to buy them, they won’t survive.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Taiwan’s Foxconn (known most famously for making the Microsoft Xbox and Apple’s iPhone and iPads) and Japan’s Innovation Network Corp. are in a bidding war for Sharp Corporation — most famous for making the AQUOS LCDs and IGZO ePaper and flexible displays.

Sharp is hemorrhaging money — and lots of it. In the last six months, they’ve lost over $220 million and over $1.8 billion in they fiscal year 2015. And, they owe banks over $4 billion in loans — loans that are rumored to be due in the next 90 days.

What is interesting about the two offers to buy Sharp is where they are coming from — both have some interesting issues. Foxconn isn’t a Japanese company; they’re Taiwanese and there are, no doubt, some politics in buying a Japanese company — especially a company as Japan-famous as Sharp. The other, Innovation Network Corp., is a Japanese company but their offer is lower than that of Foxconn’s. Plus, Foxconn has said, publicly, they won’t change the management structure of Sharp — something that Innovation Network Corp. won’t guarantee as they do make displays already and have a management team in place.

Also clouding the finality of this is that, according to public financial filings, Foxconn’s board chair, Terry Gou, actually already owns approximately 35 percent of Sharp’s display manufacturing company.

This will be an interesting one to follow but, one thing for sure, Sharp will have to make some major financial shifts to keep, or let itself be bought, to keep from collapsing this Spring.

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Here’s the Sharp corporate site.

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