FSC´s future in question?

(Disclaimer: This article is my personal opinion, i´m not aware of the official opinion of Sun Microsystems regarding this rumours)

Well, this is a really interesting development: According to the german news portal heise.de with their article "Bericht: Siemens kündigt Vertrag mit Fujitsu"(on german) and a report on Reuters Siemens wants to get out of the joint venture (JV) with Fujitsu as the Siemens CEO doesn´t see FSC as a business unit that´s profitable enough to stay in the company.

This is interesting for Sun out of a simple reason: FSC is not just that notebook company. FSC is a distributor of the SPARC Enterprise Systems (M-Class and T-Class) and those systems are identical to ours. In Germany FSC has quite a market share.

Okay, according to the reports there is an agreement in the JV contract: Whenever someone wants to get out of the JV agreement, the leaving partner has to offer it´s stake to the other partner at first. But i don´t think, that Fujitsu will buy the part ... especially not when there are signs of a adverse global economic downturn. Thus it looks reasonable that they will offer the part to someone else will buy it interested in the well known Fujitsu-Siemens brand for desktops and notebooks. It would be further reasonable to assume that a new owner would concentrate on the x86 business and thus won´t take the SPARC business. And this would open an opportunity for Sun.

Well, i will go to bed now and think a little more about this development. But as usual: Interesting times ahead of us ...


PS: Maybe this was thee reason for announcing the Xeon based mainframe a few days ago ... this would give Siemens a opportunity to keep their mainframe business without the SPARC procs from Fujitsu.