Tokyo, June 17, 2010 — Fujitsu Limited and Toshiba Corporation announced that today they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to merge their mobile phone businesses. According to the MOU, Toshiba will transfer its mobile phone business to a new company to be established October 1, 2010, and Fujitsu will acquire a majority of the shares in the company.

via www.fujitsu.com

They denied the rumor in the past, but as everyone expected, it turned out to be true. Fujitsu and Toshiba are merging their mobile handset business.

Fujitsu was the core member of "NTT family" in the past and is a long-term DoCoMo shop. Toshiba started off from a CDMA/KDDI camp as a new entrant at digitization period. In the past, there have been a loose "carrier shop" relationships in Japan, because DoCoMo had an invisible but "strong" influence to their handset vendors. Now that the Japanese mobile market is at the infliction point, finally such "power structure" seems to be collapsing.

Still, there is a very slim chance that they (Japanese handset vendors, in general) will regain the position in the global market, unfortunately.

I just wish they did this 10 years ago, but let's not speak useless "would have, could have" anymore.

Michi