Sony Turns to Investment Firm With a Taste for Unloved Assets

For its latest restructuring, Sony has turned to a private equity firm that specializes in buying unloved assets from Japanese electronics giants.

The firm, Japan Industrial Partners, is little known outside of its home country. But it was thrust into the spotlight on Thursday when it announced that it would buy Sony’s unprofitable personal computer unit, which makes notebooks and other computers under the Vaio brand name.

This is familiar territory for Japan Industrial Partners, based in Tokyo and founded in 2002, which is led by Hidemi Moue.

Just last week, it agreed to buy an Internet service provider from the Japanese information technology giant NEC. In 2012, the firm paid $676 million for the mobile telecommunications unit of the camera maker Olympus, which was embroiled in scandal.

The firm scouts the electronics landscape for turnaround opportunities, performing buyouts and other types of investments. It also invests in commodity contracts and tax liens, according to a Bloomberg profile.

“We’re looking at corporate carve-outs and spinouts from established firms when they reshuffle businesses to concentrate on their core areas,” Mr. Moue told the publication Investment & Pensions Asia last year.

Mr. Moue previously worked at a venture capital firm called Mobile Internet Capital, whose investments included FunMail, a company that turned mobile messages into animations.

Japan Industrial Partners, based in Tokyo, has teamed up over the years with Bain Capital of Boston. In 2007, the two firms bought SunTelephone, a Japanese telecommunications and equipment leasing company.

In its quest to buy noncore assets from big companies, Japan Industrial Partners has turned to the pharmaceutical industry as well. In 2010, it agreed to buy Kyowa Hakko Chemical, a maker of specialty chemicals, from its corporate parent, the drug maker Kyowa Hakko Kirin.

With Sony, Japan Industrial Partners plans to establish a new company to operate the Vaio-branded PC business. Sony said it would initially invest 5 percent of the new company’s capital. Terms of the deal are subject to further negotiations, the parties said, adding that they aim to complete the sale by July 1.

According to the announcement on Thursday, Japan Industrial Partners believes it can help the unloved computer business “achieve future growth and profitability and meet the expectations of Vaio customers by leveraging the wealth of innovative design expertise and operational know-how accumulated by Sony within the PC business.”