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Did Apple Trick Sharp?
Sharp is really regretting its dependence on Apple as its main customer.
While it made sense at the time to be extremely pleased when Apple sucked up most of its capacity with screens for its iPhone and iPad, now the tide has turned the outfit is reporting a bigger than forecast loss. Sharp is now suffering from low output at its factories and forced to write off excess capacity.
The company had a $5.1 billion net loss for the year which is much worse than it predicted. At the start of the year, Sharp was forced to curtail production of 9.7-inch screens for Apple’s iPad. That has stepped up the urgency for Sharp to find new customers and uses for its leading-technology displays and may make it harder for the company to convince investors and lenders it remains a viable company.
Sharp will officially announce its results for latest business year on May 14. To make matters worse the company is also taking a charge to put aside cash for possible fines from a display price-fixing investigation in Europe, the sources said. Sharp in October received a $4.4 billion bailout from banks including Mizuho Financial Group and Mitsubishi Financial Group in return for mortgaging nearly all its factories and offices in Japan and pledging to cut 10,000 jobs.
Hitachi Releases Terabyte SAS Drive
Hitachi has released the first 1.2TB 10,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drive for servers.
Hitachi’s hard drive operation, which is now part of Western Digital, continues to develop server and workstation hard drives while its parent firm concentrates on units pitched at desktop and laptop computers. The firm, which was the first to introduce a 1TB hard drive back in 2007, has now surpassed that barrier with its 10,000 RPM 2.5in Ultrastar C10K1200 SAS drive.
Hitachi slips a 64MB cache in each hard drive and quotes a mean time between failure (MTBF) for the Ultrastar C10K1200 of two million hours, suggesting that the drive will be perfect for those users that do big data analysis. The firm touts connector compatibility with its own Ultrastar solid state disk (SSD) drives and promotes the use of tiered storage for those considering SSDs.
Dell has announced support for Hitachi’s Ultrastar C10K1200 drives in its Poweredge and Powervault servers, with Hitachi saying that other OEMs have also qualified the drive for use in their servers.
Enterprise storage vendors such as Hitachi are pushing tiered storage for those firms that want the performance of SSDs but require the capacity of traditional hard drives. While Hitachi is right in pointing out the need for firms to deploy both SSDs and hard drives, with SSD makers rapidly bringing down prices that mix might become SSD biased within a few years.
Sharp Says No To Intel
January 15, 2013 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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While Sharp is desperately looking for more cash, it appears that it will try busking outside CES with a dog on a string before it takes money from Intel.
A senior senior executive from the Japanese company told the Mercury News denied that the company was looking for money from Intel. Industry analysts had speculated that Intel and Sharp, which supplies screens to Apple (AAPL) for its latest iPhonem, were in investment discussions.
Sharp is fighting for survival after years of losses. In November, it said it may not be able to survive on its own after full-year net losses to doubled to $5.6 billion. Sharp Vice President Kozo Takahashi told reporters at a roundtable briefing on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that the company’s finances have been weakened considerably and we are considering ways to deal with that.
Will Sharp Collapse?
November 13, 2012 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Japanese troubled telly maker, Sharp, has warned that if it can’t do something radical soon, its business could go the way of the dodo and T-Rex.
Despite being a major supplier of LCD displays to Apple and other manufacturers, the company has admitted that it can’t survive in its current form. According to Computerworld the company said that there is “material doubt” about its ability to continue operating. The company thinks that it can cut costs and secure enough credit to survive and much of its plan for recovery is based on its IGZO technology for mobile displays. This technology uses less battery power than existing screens.
Sharp is also carrying out a restructuring plan in which it has reduced headcount, slashed employee salaries and mortgaged its buildings and factories. The company is booking a net loss of $5.6 billion for the year mostly to cover its restructuring costs. Its stock has been downgraded to junk status by ratings agencies and apparently its executives have been seen around Apple and Intel HQ’s with their cloth caps in their hands looking for bail outs, or investments, depending on who you talk to.
Sharp President Takashi Okuda said the company is continuing its negotiations with Hon Hai, even though so far these have not been going that well. Sharp made a mistake in that it thought that the world wanted LCD panels for large-screen TVs. It is now trying to switch over to the booming market for tablets and smartphones.
Sharp Electronics Gets Downgraded
Sharp has had its credit rating cut to junk status by the Standard and Poor’s rating agency.
Sharp, which invested heavily during the LCD television boom in the mid 2000s, is now paying the price as demand for televisions slumps across the board. Now Standard and Poor’s has bestowed the ignominy of lowering Sharp’s credit rating to BB+, putting it into what’s called junk status.
Standard and Poor’s also warned that Sharp has weak cash flow and is facing worsening market conditions, two things that will not endear it to investors. It said, “Sharp’s liquidity position has weakened, and the company is highly dependent on short-term borrowings in light of weak internal cash flow and a less favourable funding environment.”
Sharp has had a troubled year and earlier this week announced that it will lay off 2,000 employees in Japan, as its LCD business simply cannot support itself. Standard and Poor’s said that unless Sharp’s fortunes improve, the firm could be hit with another credit rating downgrade.
Standard and Poor’s said, “We may consider lowering the ratings if Sharp’s earnings in (the year to March 2013) and prospects for its recovery deteriorate even further or the company’s financing environment and relationships with credit banks and strategic partners worsen.”
Sharp To Pay Fine In Price Fixing Settlement
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Sharp said on Monday it has agreed to pay Dell and two other firms $198.5 million to settle a lawsuit for fixing LCD panel prices in Europe and North America.
The company agreed to settle the civil lawsuit, which was first filed in November of 2009 against a group of companies including Sharp, Epson, Hitachi and Toshiba for collusion on prices of LCD panels sold to Dell. A Sharp spokeswoman said the company made the decision independent of the other firms involved in the lawsuit, and the payment would settle the suit with Dell. Sharp did not name the two other companies besides Dell.
“After broadly considering factors such as the U.S. civil lawsuit system and the facts of this case, Sharp has determined that agreeing to a settlement is the best policy,” the company said in a statement.
Dell sought damages to recover funds it paid for LCD panels purchased at inflated prices. The lawsuit involved TFT (thin film transistor) panels, widely used in TVs, laptops and handheld gadgets.
Seagate Gobbles Up Lacie
Seagate has signed a deal to buy consumer storage vendor Lacie that values the firm at $186m.
Seagate, which recently completed the acquisition of Samsung’s hard disk unit and swiftly cut warranties on most of its drives to just one year, has now announced that it will buy hard drive packager Lacie. Seagate has signed an agreement with Philippe Spruch, Lacie’s chairman and CEO, to purchase his 63.5 percent stake in the company at $7.05 per share in cash, which values the firm at $186m.
According to Seagate the purchase should help the firm grow in Europe and Japan. The firm also announced that Spruch will be employed by Seagate and run its consumer products division.
Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, CEO and president said, “Lacie has built an exceptional consumer brand by delivering exciting and innovative high end products for many years. This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium branded direct attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development.”
Lacie’s fancy portable hard drives are popular among those who like fancy cases wrapped around bog-standard consumer hard disks. Seagate’s purchase of Lacie should see the firm not only become the sole supplier of hard drives in Lacie products but make a renewed push in the consumer portable hard drive market following last year’s floods in Thailand that affected the three big hard drive manufacturers.
Seagate said the deal should be completed by the third quarter of 2012 pending regulatory approval in the US, France and Germany.
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Hitachi-LG Executives Plead Guilty
December 19, 2011 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Three executives at Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) have agreed to plead guilty and serve prison time in the U.S. for their participation in a number of conspiracies to rig bids and fix the prices of optical disk drives sold to large computer manufacturers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim and Sik “Daniel” Hur conspired with others to suppress competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to Dell and Hewlett-Packard and to fix prices for optical disk drives sold to Microsoft, the DOJ said. The conspiracies happened at various times between November 2005 and September 2009, the DOJ said.
Under a plea agreement in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Park and Kim each have agreed to serve eight months in prison and Hur has agreed to serve seven months in prison. Each has also agreed to pay a US$25,000 fine.
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Seagate To Acquire Samsung’s HD Unit
April 20, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Seagate Technology is to acquire Samsung Electronics loss-plagued hard disk drive (HDD) business for $1.4 billion as it looks to battle rival Western Digital Corp and curb price wars that continue to damage the industry.
The deal comes a month after Western Digital sought to buy Hitachi Ltd’s hard disk drive division for $4.3 billion, to create a global leader with deep resources.
It is yet to be seen whether Western Digital trump Seagate as the world’s largest hard drive maker after the deals conclude. In 2010, Seagate’s sales was $11.4 billion while Western Digital posted revenue of $9.85 billion.
Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu are the other smaller players in the hard-drive space.
The sale of the HDD business will see Samsung leave the cut-rate industry and focus on its bread-and-butter memory-chip business.
The sector is already battling persistent sales-growth declines and now faces a longer-term threat from wireless tablet devices using more power-efficient flash drives, or solid-state drives (SSD).