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Fujitsu to close its European PC business

PC market downturn spells end of an era for one of the few vendors to manufacture client devices in Europe

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Fujitsu to close its European PC business

Fujitsu is closing its BU Client Computing Devices operations in Europe and will no longer sell PCs, notebooks, workstations and peripherals from April 2024.

The sales slump in the PC market is forcing the Japanese technology giant to realign itself.

Its PC business including peripherals, will be discontinued in Europe from next April, in favour of datacentre technologies, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and data-driven platform services.

Server and storage systems will continue to play a role at Fujitsu.

Fujitsu has confirmed that maintenance contracts will be fulfilled, and spare parts for clients should still be available five years after the end of operations in April 2024.

There is no timetable for its withdrawal from the PC segment, or any indication as to the number of employees that might face redundancy as a result of Fujitsu's termination of its client business in Europe.

Employee representatives in the individual countries affected will want to have a say.

Fujitsu's withdrawal from the European PC business comes as no surprise; PC production in Augsburg, Germany, ceased in 2020.

Fujitsu was one of a handful of international PC manufacturers to manufacture in Europe. The plant in Augsburg had been maintained by Fujitsu for a significant time, but in view of years of downturn in the PC market it became inviable.

In 2018, Fujitsu announced the closure of the Augsburg plant, directly affecting 1,500 employees, and indirectly impacting 300 in other Fujitsu facilities.

The company's distribution partners anticipated the move away from client hardware.

The largest Fujitsu distributor in Europe, Bytec, added products from Lenovo into its portfolio two years prior to the closure.

"It was very important for us to have a second mainstay in the hardware portfolio alongside Fujitsu," said CEO Reinhold Egenter at the time.

A version of this article first appeared in CRN Germany.

Fujitsu to close its European PC business

PC market downturn spells end of an era for one of the few vendors to manufacture client devices in Europe

Fujitsu is closing its BU Client Computing Devices operations in Europe and will no longer sell PCs, notebooks, workstations and peripherals from April 2024.

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