Exiting large-panel LCD: halting Sakai SDP (2024)

When do you let go of a founding-scale business?

The heart of this withdrawal was the judgment of at what point to let go of the large-panel liquid-crystal business Sharp had once staked its fate on and raised. The success of Kameyama and the vast investment at Sakai pushed Sharp to the front of the world in liquid crystal, but they were also a choice to entrust the company’s core to an equipment-heavy industry of fierce price competition. Even when rising output from Chinese makers broke the economics, for a company holding the huge lines it had built and the many jobs that went with them, the decision to withdraw is easily put off. Counting from the temporary halt of 2011, Sharp went more than ten years unable to let go of large-panel LCD.

After eight years under Hon Hai, President Okitsu chose to close large-panel LCD — not only production but research and development too — and to recast the business into a shape that holds no such assets. That the Sakai site is turning into an AI data centre, and that the company, having cut away the liquid-crystal losses, returned to profit, can be counted as one outcome of the wind-down. Even so, the sale of the Kameyama No. 2 plant did not come to fruition in talks with Hon Hai, and how the vacated sites will be used and the next source of earnings built remained undecided as of this writing. A decision to let go of a business raised to founding scale deepens the wound if taken too late and nips future shoots if taken too early — that difficulty is what Sharp’s closing of the large-panel LCD curtain reflects.