| By Maureen O'Gara |
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| November 5, 2008 07:05 AM EST |
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Fujitsu is going to buy out its antsy partner Siemens for 450 million euros (currently a bit over $575 million) and take control of Fujitsu Siemens Computers BV come next April 1 when the joint venture will be integrated into the greater Fujitsu Group. Fujitsu says it will then try to make the venture profitable again.
The 50-50 joint venture managed to last nine years and it wasn't clear there for a while that Fujitsu would relieve its partner, which is now on a tear to save $1.5 billion by 2010 after it got caught bribing folks for contracts connected with other parts of its business.
Meanwhile, Fujitsu Siemens president and CEO Bernd Bischoff has resigned – supposedly for “personal reasons” – and has been replaced by the company’s CFO Kai Flore.
Fujitsu would of course be the most natural company to acquire Sun Microsystems given its long-standing Sparc interests. One wonders whether this investment scotches that possibility.
Fujitsu told Reuters Japan that its interest in Fujitsu Siemens was to gain ground on IBM and HP, which are ahead of it in EMEA in servers.
Reporting from a press conference the news service said that Fujitsu still feels that even with the acquisition "we are not at a level where we can put up a fight. We currently have a single-digit share of the market and want to take that to double digits."
There have been reports that Fujitsu might sell off Fujitsu Siemens' consumer PC business. As the largest PC maker in Europe it accounts for about 20% of its business. The Japanese company is understood to be more interested in the venture's server business; sales of servers in Japan are down and have been for the last four years.
China's Lenovo has been mentioned as a possible acquirer. Siemens expects to make about $394 million on the deal.
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