Sharp Agrees to $6.2B Bailout from Foxconn, Nikkei Says
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Taiwan has gotten decades growth by manufacturing high-tech products for other countries (phones, lcds, etc). But Korea is now posing major competition, and China is investing heavily to catch up.
Strategically, there's still good runway to convert Taiwan's existing manufacturing prowess into a vertically-integrated set of brands that can reap nice retail margins (like Samsung has done).
I suspect this angle is a big part of this deal.
South Korea has been dominating the LCD market for several years now on the high end, supplying display panels for Apple with fabs in South East Asia. China is flooding the market with cheap panels.
Taiwan is in no mans land playing catch up and labor is too expensive to compete in an industry where margins are razor thin. $6.2 Billion buys you maybe one or two LCD fabs, this is just a drop in the bucket.
Sharp is dull and has been for years, and all the money in the world won't resurrect this corpse.
Reason why no domestic player wanted to touch them with a 10foot pole though jp corps being sitting on huge mountains of money. What honhai did is secure the lcd fabs, get the patents (which seem not to be properly managed atm) and buy into japan inc. The revival of sharp as a brand seems like emotional lipservice to the japanese public.
It's a shame, they've made some really high quality and neat stuff over the years. Anyone remember their Transmeta processor laptops? MM-10, etc. I had one, it was thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air IIRC, and predated it by years. It also had a neat little charging dock that let you access the HDD as a USBHDD. Problem is, I can't see them building a product that competes with Apple, biting the hand that feeds them so to speak. Sharp make amazingly good LCD screens, but that's less important now (quality is less of a distinguishing factor) then it was when they were first doing it.
Samsung seems to have no problem doing this.
Japan colonised Taiwan and is considered to have modernised the island. The Japanese period is generally considered to have been better than what came afterwards (Chiang Kai-shek's KMT fleeing the mainland and Mao's thugs). The KMT is considered better than Mao's communist party.
Summary: Japan > KMT > Mao
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INCJ [1] http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Sharp-accepts-Hon-Hai-...
Foxconn's Deal for Sharp Now in Question http://www.wsj.com/article_email/sharp-accepts-foxconns-6-25...