Kyocera Buys Sanyo, No One Is Surprised

Today Kyocera announced that they will buy Sanyo’s mobile phones division for roughly $375 million, effective April 1st (which, conveniently, happens to be both companies’ start of the fiscal year). Sanyo’s mobile phones division has been suffering for quite a while, despite the fact that they make some pretty solid handsets. They announced that they were putting themselves on the auction block quite a while ago, and Kyocera was rumored to be the most interested party.

As part of the deal, Kyocera will offer every one of Sanyo’s 2,000 full-time employees a position, and will continue to brand handsets from that division as Sanyo’s. Basically, Kyocera just gets to keep the profits and marketshare. The hope is that this will help them expand further into markets such as the U.S.. Both Kyocera and Sanyo historically only produce CDMA handsets for Sprint and Verizon’s network in the United States. Kyocera’s handsets are mostly available on Virgin Mobile’s MVNO, while Sanyo had a particularly strong relationship with Sprint Nextel.