As PC market suffers, is a big laptop merger on the cards?

Toshiba Dynapad

Currently, the PC market is in the midst of an historic slump – at least according to IDC's latest figures (and everyone else certainly agrees that it's bad) – so it's not too surprising to hear that in the face of this, some vendors are mulling over their position in the market, and potentially radical moves.

Indeed, according to the latest rumour from DigiTimes, three manufacturers are considering a merger of their laptop businesses – namely Toshiba, Fujitsu and Vaio. The latter, of course, used to be a Sony brand, but is now a standalone company based in Japan after Sony sold its PC division off back in 2014.

As always with rumours from DigiTimes, this comes from the far east supply chain, and apparently Pegatron – which deals with the supply of the majority of Toshiba laptops – has been told by Toshiba to hold production of some 300,000 units, which is believed to indicate the fact that a merger might be about to happen.

This move has been previously rumoured, too, so witnessing it pop up again lends credence to the speculation – although it is of course, at this point, still just speculation.

Given the prevailing winds of the PC market, however, drastic action wouldn't be surprising. There really isn't much good news in the PC arena right now, although Apple is managing growth with its Macs swimming against the tide, and convertible 2-in-1s are set to pick up some serious momentum this year and further out.

At the end of last week, Vaio revealed some new flagship laptops featuring some really neat design touches, and early in January Toshiba unveiled its new Dynapad which the company hopes will be able to take on Microsoft's Surface Pro 4.

Via: Ubergizmo

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).