The reins will be handed to 44-year-old executive managing officer Robert Wu Po-Hsuan, head of Sharp’s global brand products division, who will also serve as deputy chairman, according to an announcement Friday. Tai, 70, will stay on as chairman.

Wu – who, like Tai, comes from Sharp’s Taiwanese parent Foxconn – will face the task of laying out a road map for growth and fattening still-slim profit margins.

More immediately, he faces the question of what to do with a liquid crystal display factory that contributed to the financial losses that led to Sharp’s 2016 acquisition by iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn.

At that time, the company was groaning under huge investments in LCD and solar panel production.

After a painstaking fight against waste that extended as far as individual sheets of paper, Sharp turned a net profit for the first time in four years in the fiscal year ended March 2018.

The company returned to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s first section in December 2017 following a demotion to the second tier.

A Sharp executive recalls a “unique sense of being on our toes” under Tai, a fluent Japanese speaker with mild manners and an eye for detail. “All of the division heads felt the need to go see him right away no matter when he called,” the executive said.

Sharp expects to remain solidly in the black for the year ending next month, forecasting a group net profit of ¥85 billion. The company has retired all of the preferred shares it had issued to raise cash during its earlier crisis.

Tai – once considered a potential candidate to lead Foxconn after Gou’s departure – declared in June 2018 that Sharp would become a brand company.

Under his leadership, it has pivoted away from panels and other components in favour of branded products like appliances.

“We laid a foundation on which to build our next 100 years of history,” Tai said of his nearly six years as CEO.

Yet the company still has a way to go to build earnings potential. Its operating profit margin hovers around 2% to 3%.

Sharp “hasn’t come out with a medium-term plan, and it hasn’t been able to lay out a strategy to grow its businesses”, said Yasuo Nakane, consumer electronics analyst at Mizuho Securities.

Charting a path to growth will be the job of Tai’s successor.

Wu joined Foxconn in 2001 and led Sharp’s Thai unit after the acquisition, before moving to his current role as an executive managing director.

He has recently sat in on meetings alongside Tai virtually from Taiwan, learning his management style. Tai will support the new CEO as chairman.

The new Sharp chief will have one tricky task awaiting him right away: how to handle Japanese affiliate Sakai Display Products.

Sharp said Friday that it has entered talks to acquire the rest of Sakai Display’s outstanding shares to turn it into a wholly owned subsidiary.

Since Sharp brought the display maker’s factory online in 2009, the facility has not generated enough profit to justify the massive investment. An asset management company for Gou had owned a majority interest in the plant, but unloaded its stake by 2019.

Sharp has vacillated in its approach to Sakai Display, based in the city of Sakai just outside of Osaka. At one point, it had considered turning the display maker into a subsidiary, only to stop short of a buyout.

Last year, Sharp said it would sell its entire remaining stake, but it could not reach a deal with the would-be buyer and was forced to scrap the plan.

Sharp now owns 20% of the Sakai Display. It has entered talks about acquiring the rest with World Praise, a Samoa-registered investment vehicle that holds the remaining 80%.

In discussing the acquisition, Tai has stressed the importance of a reliable supply of panels for the TV business, and cited the “risk in depending too heavily on China for core parts”.

Foxconn-owned Sharp needs to navigate tensions trade and technology tensions involving China, Taiwan and the US.

Supplying products for which demand is rising, such as laptop computer displays, will smooth out fluctuations in the more volatile market for larger panels, the thinking goes.

Sakai Display reported a net loss of more than ¥100 billion for 2020.

The display market is weaker now than it was last spring, when Sharp made its earlier decision to sell the affiliate, complicating matters for Wu even further.