
Sharp Agrees to $6.2B Bailout from Foxconn, Nikkei Says - ytch
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/sharp-agrees-to-6-2-billion-bailout-from-foxconn-nikkei-says
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eob
This gives Foxconn/Honhai a globally recognized brand to put on products,
which is a big deal for the growth of Taiwan's economy.

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.

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andyjsong
> But Korea is now posing major competition, and China is investing heavily to
> catch up.

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.

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fnordfnordfnord
>Sharp is dull and has been for years, and all the money in the world won't
resurrect this corpse.

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.

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endemic
> biting the hand that feeds them

Samsung seems to have no problem doing this.

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FreedomToCreate
Well I'm somewhat surprised the Japanese government didn't step up...or in
fact any Japanese company. Sharp may be losing money but there display tech is
a head of the game, and you know, Japanese nationalism.

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venomsnake
Well Taiwan is special case due to Chiang Kai-shek. The relationships between
him, japanese and the civil war in china are very interesting.

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mafribe
Japan and Taiwan are on friendly terms, more so than Taiwan and mainland
China.

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

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daegloe
Not so fast...

Foxconn's Deal for Sharp Now in Question
[http://www.wsj.com/article_email/sharp-accepts-
foxconns-6-25...](http://www.wsj.com/article_email/sharp-accepts-
foxconns-6-25-billion-takeover-offer-1456367642-lMyQjAxMTA2MjI3NTIyNjUxWj)

~~~
ksec
This just show how much crap Sharp is in. And i now honestly hope Foxconn back
out. Sharp just isn't worth 6B.

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frivoal
Nice to see that economic reason prevailed over protectionism, but at the same
time, sharp would probably be a good company to split into various smaller
businesses. It's doing to many barely related things.

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ekianjo
You can say the same thing for every zaibatsu out there in Japan. Sony.
Panasonic. Mitsubishi and the like.

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frivoal
They're not zaibatsu, but the point stands.

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noja
Is it a "bailout"?

