Foxconn is considering buying Sharp for $ 5 billion

According to The Wall Street Journal, Hon Hai Precision, one of the largest Taiwanese companies, known on the international market under the Foxconn brand, offered to buy the legendary Japanese corporation. A serious competitor, also willing to buy Sharp, is Japan's state investment fund Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), which is already one of the company's shareholders.

It is noteworthy that the Japanese media announced the interest of INCJ at the beginning of last week, but it was the news about Foxconn’s interest that dramatically affected the value of shares of the Japanese corporation - after the appearance of this information in the network, the cost of Sharp shares immediately increased by a quarter, showing an increase of 23%. Despite this, the main creditors of a company experiencing a serious economic crisis — Mizuho and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ — are leaning toward the option of a national enterprise considering the long-term perspective, not wanting to transfer an important asset to a foreign organization.

In recent years, Sharp has lost a significant share of the display market to competitors from South Korea and China, and the company's profit from the sale of mobile phones has also dropped significantly - once one of the most profitable sectors for a Japanese corporation. In 2013, Samsung bought 3% of the shares of its once-serious competitor for $ 111 million, after which rumors of a takeover of Sharp began. However, no further action from the South Korean giant followed. At the same time, Foxconn showed interest in Sharp back in 2012, when the chairman of Hon Hai Precision, Terry Gow, bought out more than a third of the shares of the Sharp division responsible for the production of liquid crystal displays, and last month he also declared his readiness to return the former glory of the legendary corporation for her 300 billion yen. Now we are talking about the amount of twice as much - 600 billion yen, or 5.1 billion US dollars.
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Direct competitor Foxconn in the fight for the famous Japanese brand, INCJ has not yet announced its price. Until that moment, the largest transaction of the fund, founded in 2009, was the purchase of a joint venture Hitachi, Toshiba and Sony for the production of displays, known as Japan Display, for 200 billion yen. In addition to buying the entire corporation, the INCJ board is also considering the option of acquiring the Toshiba electronics division and its subsequent merger with the corresponding Sharp subsidiary.