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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 don't like the recent tread of consolidation in the IT market... This needs to stop.
What we learned today: Western Digital still exists.
Yes I assure you, we are quite safe from your "competition" here.
So WD realized that hard drive business is kaput.
No wonder we're still waiting for a 8TB consumer drive from them. They are curbing research spending...
You remember before verizon bought alltel there was the big five? Alltel had unlimited data both for phones and aircards. After verizon bought them? None of those plans are offered anymore. And the fcc said it wouldn't hurt competition yeah I still don't see that.
No tmobile does not count that's unlimited 2g only. Although I'm sure verizon would be happy to let me pay for unlimited QNC again If I could find a phone that was still compatible.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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 !
SSD's are typically right around $0.33/GB on the low end (up to 256GB), with prices closer to $0.30/GB at the higher end (480GB-1TB).
The best prices right now are around $40 for 120GB, $75-80 for 240/256GB, $150-170 for 480-512GB, and $300-ish for 960GB-1TB.
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.
Many computer manufacturers still charge ~$1/GB for SSDs.
Gods help you if your new machine takes an unusual SSD or is hard to disassemble.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Therefore, spending $1 billion to buy a company worth less than $1B HURTS the company's value. See HP for some dramatic examples.
Not always true. For one example: Company A buys company B for $2.2B, but company B is only "worth" $2B. You say company A is taking a $200M loss. Looks bad at the outset, but looks can be deceiving... read on:
But what if Company B had the potential to be a $4B value, but lacked, say for the sake of argument, $800M to ramp up production. Then Company A, that has the capital, would GAIN $1B for their investment ( 2.2B + 0.8B = $3B spent for a $4B company ). I would consider this a "good deal" on the purchase, even if it LOOKS bad at the outset.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
They still wasted $200M by giving $2.2B for a company that was only worth $2B.
Yes on smart phone's only. plans for hotspots/aircards/tablets appear to max out at 11gb (rather odd imho as verizon will let you select up to a 100gb online) unlimited LTE is not offered.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
> The 200 Million extra spend could easily be eaten up by R&D costs and lost market share. This could be a strategic purchase, not a financial one.
The company I work for was just aquired under just such a scenario. The board had three options:
R&D the needed tech: $40 million
Lease license the needed tech: $30 million
Buy a company who had the tech: $20 million
That IS a financial decision, I'd say.
Ps - I don't know how many million the actual costs were for the company I work for. I do know that buying the subsidiary made better financial sense than doing the R&D or licensing the tech.
This doesn't account for actual usage of drive space, people with 8 TB drives might need 8TB of space, but most people STILL don't need that much space.
There's a real problem at the very price-sensitive low end, where you need to provision an embedded device with just enough storage to boot off and store its logs. Several times we've ended up buying low-capacity SSDs from... not entirely salubrious Chinese manufacturers because they're the only ones that can hit the required price point. Everyone's chasing the high-end as-large-a-capacity-as-possible unit-sales market, but sourcing a consignment of 8GB SSDs where you're ready to order a container-load of them at once is near impossible from known-brand manufacturers.