Japan's Hitachi said it is withdrawing from the home personal-computer business amid sluggish sales as it searches for more lucrative endeavors.
Hitachi , which helped pioneer PC technology in Japan three decades ago, has not developed new Prius-brand PCs for the year-end shopping season and will stop making them, Hitachi spokesman Keisaku Shibatani said on Tuesday.
The sprawling conglomerate, whose products range from nuclear reactors to washing machines, ranked eighth in Japan's PC market with a 4.5 percent share in the year ended in March, according to MM Research Institute.
It will scale back production at its factory in Toyokawa, central Japan, to server-based computers for businesses, he said. Hitachi contracted out production of its other PCs to Hewlett-Packard earlier this year.
"We want to develop new computers for use in the broadcasting industry, which is becoming more digitized," Shibatani said, without elaborating.
Japanese PC makers, which include supercomputer makers like Hitachi and NEC, have been dwarfed in the global PC market by the likes of Dell , Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo Group.