German conglomerate Siemens AG is looking to end its participation in Fujitsu Siemens Computer, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter".
The joint venture made $10.3bn (£5.3bn) in sales last year, but Siemens chief executive Peter Loscher is reportedly unhappy overall with the performance of FSC, which never found a real foothold in the US in the face of competition with HP and Dell.
"We have said that we want to focus on the three sectors — industry, energy, healthcare — and that we want to concentrate on them," a spokesman for Siemens told Forbes on Wednesday.
Following a bribery scandal last year, Siemens is looking to increase its profitability and has recently shed several assets, and announced plans to lay off four percent of its workforce.
But Japan-based Fujitsu may not be all that disappointed. In a Tuesday news conference, Fujitsu president Kuniaki Nozoe said mobile phones are going to be a more profitable business than PCs. That could mean it may not be interested in acquiring Siemens's 50 percent stake in the venture, for which it has right of first refusal.
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FSC, which was founded in 1999, wasn't able to take advantage collectively of the companies' individual strengths in Europe and Asia, respectively, and subsequently "foundered on the shoals of a capricious and rapidly evolving IT market", said analyst Charles King of Pund-IT in a research note Wednesday.
The Journal quotes a banker who said the nine-year-old joint venture could be valued at between $3.12bn and $4.65bn.
