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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.
What we learned today: Western Digital still exists.
Ok, we'll stop it. We didn't know it was bothering you. Sorry.
signed -- Worldwide IT Business
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...
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 !
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.