The collaboration between Fujitsu and Siemens goes way back to the early days of the 20th century, when Japan looked to Germany more than to the U.S. for help in becoming a modern nation. Even the Japanese company's name contains a reference to its long-time German partner.

But  the long-standing collaboration grew apart this week when the companies announced that Fujitsu would pay $584 million for Siemens' half of their European IT joint venture, Fujitsu Siemens Computers FSC), which provides servers, PCs and other IT hardware to European customers.

One reason  for the sale is Siemens CEO Peter Löscher's declared intent to shed non-core businesses and to focus on industry, energy and health care. The joint venture employs 6,200 in Germany.

Kuniaki Nozoe, Fujitsu's president, said in a statement: “IT is a main business for Fujitsu, and Siemens would like to focus on industry, energy and health.”

Fujitsu indicated that the Siemens name will be dropped once the deal is completed.

The divorce heads off a possible conflict with Siemens, which provides IT services to industry. Recently FSC won an IT services contract with German car company Daimler and Fujitsu has indicated its intention to become a full-service provider of IT services as well as hardware and to compete better against companies like Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

FSC reported a net profit of €68 million on revenue of €6.6 billion ($8.53 billion) in 2007. FSC has been profitable since 2000 but is expected to lose around €100m this year, mainly because of poor sales of consumer PCs.