Last year, Sony sold its struggling VAIO PC business to the private equity fund Japan Industrial Partners, Inc., which soon ceased selling computers outside of Japan. Now VAIO Corp. wants its computers to take on the world once again.
VAIO Corp. plans to begin selling laptops at Microsoft's U.S. retail stores in October, the company's CEO Yoshimi Ota told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Wednesday. The company's first new computer to be sold in the U.S. will be the VAIO Z Canvas, a tablet with a detachable keyboard. VAIO Corp. is also planning a partnership with Brazilian company Positivo Informatica to manufacture and distribute its PC designs.
Reviving a foundering brand is obviously a tall order. The PC market is even more saturated now than it was when Sony first launched VAIO two decades ago, and VAIO's market share in Japan has even fallen to less than 1 percent, according to research firm Euromonitor, as reported by WSJ.
In order to turn things around, VAIO Corp. plans to target high-end consumers rather than appeal to the mass market, Ota told WSJ. The company's new computers will start at $2,199 in the U.S., more than twice the price of the mass-market machines Sony sold globally. It hopes to first get the attention of graphic designers, photographers and other heavy users of Apple's Mac computers.
VAIO Corp. also has plans for many other new products in the future. The company is working on a document-size laptop with cellular capability and desktop PCs. It has also started manufacturing an entertainment robot called Palmi and has plans to make more robots under the VAIO name in the future. There are also plans to "add communication devices, wearable gadgets and factory-automation machines with artificial intelligence," WSJ reports. Ota predicted that profits from non-PC products would equal that of those from PCs by fiscal 2017.
Ota also told WSJ that he foresees the company achieving an initial public offering by June 2018. He would also like to see Japan Industrial Partners exit VAIO Corp. that same year through an initial public offering or a sale to another company, possibly even Sony.
