VAIO displays an excellent example of innocent optimism

Aug 19, 2015 10:01 GMT  ·  By

After dwindling sales and long periods of unprofitable results, Sony finally sold the VAIO brand to a Japanese investment fund called Japanese Industrial Partners.

At first, the company decided to start selling locally, but then moved to the international scene again and picked US and Brazil as the first markets outside of Japan where it could develop a new lineup of products.

Under Sony supervision, VAIO turned into a low-cost, even dangerous brand of entry-level mobile platforms that became unprofitable in time and eventually lost its value. However, the new leadership wants to change that and direct VAIO towards premium products dedicated to artists, photographers and designers who are mainly using Apple computers.

VAIO hopes to make a return to glory by chewing at Apple's market

The first product VAIO wants to sell to such a select and quite conservative public would be the VAIO Canvas Z, a large tablet with a detachable keyboard that comes with an i7 processor, a 256GB SSD, and up to 16GB of memory space.

The slate will arrive with a starting price of $2,199 (€1,992) on October 5, with preorders available at the middle of September. The weird thing, though, is that the Brazilian market has no info about such new VAIO devices.

Apparently, according to a Wall Street Journal article, VAIO wants to move beyond the PC industry and start building smartphones and communication devices, entertainment robots and factory automation machines. So, out of nowhere, we'll soon have some VAIO robot toys.

It's quite difficult to see how VAIO will re-establish growth in a shrinking PC market that is currently experiencing one of its largest and alarming drops in the last ten or more years. Apparently, VAIO's leadership doesn't care about such numbers since it doesn't count tablets as PCs and Apple still fares quite well.

And considering that VAIO targets Apple's American market, it doesn't seem to have a reason to fear failure. Right now, the company thinks that it will return to an operating profit by the end of the year, while it awaits for a potential buyer. Among the mentioned names in this regard are Microsoft, Apple, and even Sony.