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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.
The idea behind free market has always been that whenever there is a buck to be made somebody will endeavor to make it
However, the reality that we live in doesn't work like that --- your exmple of Verizon's acquisition of Alltel which puts further burdens on the consumer, and TFA's WD gobbling up SanDisk are but two of the many examples of how the big corps are fucking up the market place and nobody can do anything about it!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The HDD market had some of the slimmest margins in the tech industry - about 1%-2%. The HDD manufacturers just weren't making enough money to even keep up with basic R&D. It needed to be consolidated. The floods in Thailand happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Unfortunately, they happened right in the middle of the last recession, resulting in what's probably over-consolidation.
The WD-Hitachi merger still isn't finalized. China hasn't given their final approval. My brother-in-law is working on this for WD and is pulling his hair out over how obtuse the China government has been.
WD has been buying SSD manufacturers for a while now. Silicon Systems in 2009, then sTec, Skyera. SanDisk is a much bigger name, but this isn't something they just started doing.