Contract Manufacturing | 堺, 2 April 2016 — Sharp Signed Itself Over Inside the Plant That Broke It

Sharp spent ¥430 billion on the Sakai plant and started it in October 2009, and it was the largest liquid-crystal works in the world. It ran tenth-generation glass, sheets around three metres on a side, on a site close to four times the area of the Kameyama works that had made Sharp's name in flat-panel television. Then television demand collapsed after 2008, panels went into glut, the yen stayed strong, and Korean rivals had cheaper capital. The most advanced plant in the industry ran below capacity, and the losses scaled with it: ¥376 billion in the year to March 2012, and ¥545.3 billion the year after. In 2012 Sharp's management asked 郭台銘 for help. He put ¥66 billion of his own money, through a personal investment company, into 37.61 per cent of the Sakai subsidiary. The company was renamed 堺ディスプレイプロダクト, keeping the initials SDP, and Sharp and Hon Hai ran the plant together. That was the opening. Four years later Hon Hai bid for the parent. Sharp's board accepted on 25 February 2016; Hon Hai suspended the deal the same day over roughly ¥350 billion of contingent liabilities disclosed a day earlier, then came back with ¥100 billion cut from the price. On 2 April 2016, 郭台銘 and Sharp's president 高橋興三 signed at the Sakai plant, in front of more than three hundred reporters, in the building whose losses had put the company on the table. ¥388.8 billion for 66 per cent. Sharp had turned down a rival rescue backed by the trade ministry through the INCJ. It was the first foreign takeover of a major Japanese electronics maker, and the first time a Taiwanese company had bought a large Japanese manufacturer. 郭台銘 told the press conference he would have Sharp profitable within two years. The money landed on 12 August 2016. 高橋 resigned and 戴正吳 took over. Panel production at Sakai ended on 21 August 2024. SoftBank contracted for part of the site in June 2024 and KDDI in December, both for AI data centres, and 積水化学工業 took the solar plant for perovskite cells. The photograph shows both names still up, SHARP on one block and SDP on the other, with the shared entrance between them. Generation-ten glass needed a very large, very clean, very well-powered building. So do racks of accelerators. Photo: L26, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons