Fujitsu snaps up Siemens share of computer company

FUJITSU WILL PICK up a 50 per cent stake in Fujitsu Siemens Computers after its partner, Siemens, announced it would sell its half share for €450 million ($567 million).

The deal, expected to go through by April 1st 2009 after clearing regulatory hurdles, should give Fujitsu quite a boost in the Euro market for storage, servers and services where the wholly-owned Fujitsu entity will probably shift focus to trying for better margins in server and storage sales.

There have been some whispers that Fujitsu may want out of the lower margin computer business, in which Fujitsu-Siemens made net sales of €6.6 billion with an operating income of just €72 million in 2007. The pre-tax profit was relatively low at just €105 million, and some reckon a sell-out to Lenovo is on the cards, but company spinner Adam Blankenship denied the rumours, telling the INQ "Fujitsu is not holding talks with Lenovo to sell the consumer PC business. "

“We continue to focus our company on the strategic sectors industry, energy and health care," noted Joe Kaeser, CFO of Munich-based Siemens.

The deal has purportedly been on the cards for a while with the contract establishing Netherlands based Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) about to end in a few months anyway. FSC had been set up in October 1999 as a 50-50 joint venture, employing over 10,000 people, just over half of them in Germany.

Blankenship told the INQ there were currently no plans to lay off FSC employees, however, FSC's president and CEO Bernd Bischoff is reported to have resigned for 'personal reasons' to be replaced by Kai Flore, currently FSC’s CFO.

According to Fujitsu, “Transforming FSC into a wholly owned subsidiary will open the door to a new era of global expansion”. A new name for FSC should be pulled out of Fujitsu’s hat by April, said Blankenship. µ