On Feb 4, 2016, Sharp officially announced that it has been holding negotiations with several companies regarding its initiatives for corporate reconstruction, and has narrowed the candidates down to two entities, Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) and Hon Hai precision industry. INCJ is known to be coordinated by Japanese government while Hon Hai is more known as Foxconn, based in Taiwan.

We suspect that Foxconn has a higher chance to be a parent company or merge Sharp as this Taiwanese company has long been interested in investing in Sharp, and Foxconn was reportedly submitting higher amount of investment than state-back fund.

If Sharp finally decides to get acquired by Foxconn in a month, we could think of the following repercussion. (1) Foxconn could gain better brand awareness by this merger, so Foxconn may be able to create more own-branded devices across smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, home appliances and others to target both developed and emerging market. (2) Apple will be able to use Sharp’s display panel division to test its aim of adopting OLED in 2017 / 2018. (3) It would deliver NO good signal for two South Korean display panel companies, Samsung Display and LG Display, eventually.