Sony has announced that it will be selling its VAIO PC business to Japan Industrial Partners (JIP). The two companies will hammer out an agreement by the end of March, and in the meantime Sony "will cease planning, design, and development of PC products," the company said in a press release. "Manufacturing and sales will also be discontinued after the Spring 2014 lineup to be launched globally."

Current VAIO buyers will still be able to get support, either from Sony itself or from JIP. Post-acquisition, JIP will be focusing on consumer PC sales in the Japanese market, with "further geographic expansion" possible later on. Most VAIO division employees will either go to JIP, move to other divisions within Sony, or be offered "an early retirement support program to assist their reemployment outside of the Sony Group."

Sony's move comes during a volatile period for the entire PC industry. Year-over-year shipments have been falling consistently for the last two years, and the only company to post market share and unit shipment growth to speak of has been Lenovo. Even Apple, which used to brag on its earnings calls that Mac shipment growth was beating the broader PC market, has started to brag that Mac shipments are declining at a slower rate than the broader PC market (last quarter's unusually good Mac numbers excepted).

The market slowdown has resulted in high-level shakeups at HP, and Dell has gone private to rid itself of shareholder pressure. Both companies are relying on the enterprise side of their businesses to bolster revenue while the consumer side droops. For smaller OEMs without much of a stake in businesses, things have been even worse—Acer replaced its CEO, and Asus is reportedly looking to shift into smartphones as its PC sales shrink.

Further Reading Review: Sony’s VAIO Flip 13 dies the death of a thousand cuts reported previously, the company's credit rating has been downgraded repeatedly, and the company as a whole hasn't posted a full-year profit in five years. Individual divisions like the PlayStation business are doing reasonably well, but the TV business has lost $7.8 billion over the last decade, just to pick a prominent example from the company's sprawling collection of product lines. The company is expected to post another full-year loss for 2013, and it's spinning its TV business off into a wholly owned subsidiary in an effort to make the business more efficient (Sony CEO Kaz Hirai said there were no plans to sell the TV business off at the moment, though that can obviously change as soon as it makes financial sense).

The VAIO PCs we've seen over the last couple of years have been fine, but midrange models like the VAIO Fit have trouble standing out from the crowd while convertibles like the VAIO Flip 13 just aren't as good as competing offerings. It sounds like JIP is going to be focusing on the Japanese market at first, so we may not even be able to buy VAIO PCs in the US a year from now. JIP might be able to turn things around, but given the state of the PC market, that's far from a sure bet.