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Western Digital To Buy SanDisk (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Reuters reports that Western Digital will buy SanDisk in a deal worth roughly $19 billion. In a press release, WD said, "The combination is the next step in the transformation of Western Digital into a storage solutions company with global scale, extensive product and technology assets, and deep expertise in non-volatile memory (NVM)." SanDisk has been in business since 1988, and primarily "manufactures flash memory chips and other digital storage for personal computers, data centers and consumer electronics, including smartphones and tablets." They have over 8,000 employees, compared to WD's ~76,000. This follows another major transaction in the storage market, when Dell bought EMC last week.
I interpret their relative slowness to market as doing proper testing before releasing product.
I had an array of 4 western digital 4TB drives. Added 2 Seagate 6TB drives, as they were the only company that produced them at the time. One failed after six months - replaced that one, the second died after another 4 or 5 months. I quickly bought two 6TB WD drives and mirrored the data before both Seagate drives failed again. The old 4TB WD drives are still running fine, as are the new 6TB drives, two years later.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
SSDs fell below $1/GB years ago. They've been stuck around $0.30-0.40/GB for a while.
The problem is that stock markets still expect the large companies to post revenue growth at the same rates as they did when they were smaller companies. Of course as they get larger and larger it becomes harder to keep up such growth. Growing a $10M company 5% is a lot easier than a $10B company. So they resort to buying other companies to get their growth. Or layoffs in order to improve their income statement.
Not that I agree with the methods because they are doing them just to help the stock price.
Not entirely true.
There's the concept of a 'growth' stock versus a 'value' stock. Several tech companies (Microsoft, Apple, others) have transitioned into value stocks by starting to pay dividends, stock buybacks, etc.
Wall Street doesn't *only* care about growth. There's plenty of companies that have single-digit year-over-year gains that do very nicely.
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