Foxconn Set To Acquire Sharp Corporation For $5.6 Billion (appleinsider.com)

Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturing/assembly company, is reported to be finalizing a deal to acquire Sharp Corporation for $5.6 billion, with the beleaguered company having finally rejected a proposed government rescue package in favor of the deal. Foxconn, formerly known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd, was brought to media attention in 2010, when the company installed suicide nets to stop the high number of employee suicides at company dorms. Although it seems out of the ordinary that one of the world's few producers of LCD panels is negotiating with Foxconn, the deal is expected to go through, making it one of the biggest foreign takeovers of a Japanese company.

Comments

last chance to buy quality Sharp products

[frovingslosh]

That's a shame. I've always found Sharp products to be of good quality and very reasonably priced. That will end very soon now.

Re:last chance to buy quality Sharp products

[retroworks]

Foxconn's Terry Gou is every bit a genius as Wozniak, and Taiwan should be proud of him. Gou's Foxconn techs are at least half (if not more) of the Apple IPhone tech advance (the Taiwan Foxcon techs were already manufacturing and designing IPods, and were wicked good at touch display, before iPhone was manufactured by them... there is a quarrel whether Apple bought key Taipai techs and moved them to Vancouver). If you are 582462 on Slashdot you should be way too old to generate racist anti-Taiwan rants. Taiwan geeks are quite honorable, and I have no doubt they can make Sharp proud.

Re:last chance to buy quality Sharp products

[JanneM]

Geeks are just as good the world over, whether Japan, Taiwan, EU, US or China. Product quality has nothing to do with the quality of the designers and builders and everything to do with the budget and time constraints they have to do their stuff. And that is all about where their company wants to position itself in the price/quality/reputation landscape.

Sharp has a well-deserved reputation for good quality and sometimes off-beat or niche products that delight a few even if they don't become huge sellers. And that's of course part reason why they've been in trouble for some years now. Foxconn doesn't have a reputation for premium products or for doing their own thing.

I share the worry that Sharp as we know it will disappear, and just become another nameplate pasted on bland, forgettable me-too stuff.

Re:last chance to buy quality Sharp products

[Zebai]

This may have been what Sharp was but I don't think that's the way they are today. Many of Sharp's current products are just rebranded from some other company they absorbed and put their name on it I think you would be hard pressed to find any genuine Sharp researched, built, and finalized product thats not some build on something they made years ago. I often found it funny that on some of their fax machines/copiers I could load another brand names cartridge into it perfectly even down to the software recognition of cartridge's on board chip if it had one.

Re:The link is broken.

[ncc74656]

The Referer Control extension for Chrome used to fix this: set it to use Google as the referrer and WSJ links just worked.

I guess the WSJ no longer wants Google to index its articles.

Sharp used to make cool techie stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Like this thing..

Of course, that was back in the days before mindless consumerism, when "tech" meant something beyond "Facebook portal and devices for people who wouldn't know a transistor from a capacitor".

Re:Paywalled

[whipslash]

Sorry about that. Gonna make sure to stop this going forward

Re:Paywalled

[Striek]

Sorry about that. Gonna make sure to stop this going forward

Thank you, sir. It is much appreciated, I'm sure by everyone. We cannot discuss an article we cannot read.

Sharp was cool

[execthis]

Sharp really had it for a while, then lost it. The Zaurus line was so cool and so ahead of everything else at the time. Does anyone remember Ångström distribution, OpenZaurus, and Cacko ROM? I think Angstrom was kind of like a precursor for xda-developers.