Toshiba Australia is under pressure after Lenovo moved into the Australian consumer PC market late last year, the big question is will they survive.
14 months ago the Australian operation was given a life by its parent Company when they moved to shut down 19 of their global consumer PC operations now questions are being asked as to whether they will join Sony and Samsung and exit the Australian consumer PC market.
In the 12 months since the decision was made to cut Toshiba consumer PC sales from 32 Countries to 13 Toshiba Australia has seen their PC sales fall in the top end of the Australian PC market with Lenovo and their Yoga Pro 3 and Yoga Pro 2 models stripping share away from Toshiba and their struggling Kira range according to new GFK data.
Also surging in the mid-level PC market is Acer who is now reporting profits and significantly increased sales.
JB Hi Fi management reported a 40% jump in premium PC sales following the launch of the Lenovo consumer PC range, this was on top of both Samsung and Sony exiting the Australian PC market.
Toshiba management have not commented on rumours that the Australian operation may also be paired back to concentrate on the B2B markets where Acer is gaining found after winning a $40M Victorian Government contract.
Acer has also gained share in the Chromebook market up against Toshiba with the Taiwanese Company shipping over 10,000 Chromebooks for use by Woolworth’s management who dropped Windows in favour of Googles Chrome OS.
Recently shares in Toshiba fell nearly 5 percent after the company said it was looking into possible accounting irregularities, its second investigation into its bookkeeping practices in less than two years.
The Japanese Company said that it may have underreported the costs of some projects in the business year that started in April 2013.
In October 2013 Toshiba announced that it found its medical subsidiary, Toshiba Medical information Systems, had overstated results for several years.
Also under pressure is Toshiba’s processor business, Gartner said that they had recently been forced to re-assessed its opinion of Toshiba’s annual chip sales for 2014 to $10.655 billion down from the $11.589 billion Toshiba reported in January. As a result Gartner has changed the ranking putting Texas Instruments at position six and above Toshiba ranked seventh.
We have asked Toshiba to comment on the future of their consumer PC business in Australia.
