Hard Drive manufacturer, Western Digital, revealed that it has finalized a deal to acquire SanDisk, the famous chipmaker, for an amount of $19 billion. This is being called the latest wave of consolidation in the chip-making industry.
Western Digital CEO, Stephen Milligan, said that the deal is response to the explosion in the data creation industry in both, the business and world and amongst consumers, and the increasing need for more storage. He said:
We want to make sure that we have the broadest set of storage devices in the industry. We want to make sure we’ve got the best technology, and we want to use that platform to create even more unique devices for our customers and add even more value.
The acquisition of SanDisk will allow Western Digital to branch out the manufacture processes for the Solid State Drives. The cash and stock values of SanDisk are at $86.50 per share and sum to a total equity of about $19 billion using a five-day weighted average pricing of Western Digital’s share value at $79.60. SanDisk’s shares rose by more than 2 percent to $77 before the acquisition news.
Demand for cheaper chips and new faster products to power the latest smart devices alongside technology companies which are pushing to consolidate suppliers has led to record levels of new deals in the semiconductor industry in 2015.
The value of SanDisk acquisition will depend on the closing and approval of the investment in Western Digital from the Chinese state-backed Tsinghua Holdings owned Unispledour Corp. According to Milligan, he is confident that the deal will pass the regulatory approval but he did say that it may take quite some time to complete the process. The deal is expected to close sometime in the third quarter of 2016.
Milligan said:
We’re obviously going to look to close the transaction as quickly as we can, but right now our current view is that because of the complexity and the size of the transaction, and the interactions that we’ll have to have with regulators across the globe, we’re targeting that the transaction will be cleared and closed in the third calendar quarter of ’16.
Western Digital is biggest name in the hard drive industry while SanDisk and its memory cards and SSDs are considered top of the line. A merger this big will most certainly affect the state of the market and the pricing and technological improvements for consumer products.
They had to do this. They knew one day, it would become impossible to further expand hard drive storage. An SSD can solely provide 100 times more storage space than any 10TB hard drive. Although, this technology has not been brought to market and still in research phase but it is possible now.
Intel has just now been able to acheive 2TB storage capacity on their SSDs thanks of NVMe technology, which still costs a fortune, and here you’re talking about 1 Petabyte storage space on SSD. Either you’re out of your mind or you have no idea what you’re talking about. I doubt we’ll see SSDs hit that capacity in our lifetime, if ever.
Really? Samsung has already launched 16 TB SSD. You are nothing but an uneducated douche*bag who utters crap and non-sense. Fuc*kin nutjob.
Yes, really d*ckwad. At least read properly before opening your stupid mouth so your ignorance is doesn’t show. Samsung has launched no such thing. The 16TB SSD they demoed was just a research prototype showcasing their NAND tech and is a long way from being commercially available.
Ugh. Idiot. That will be available to consumers from 2016 onward which is not far away.. Samples have already been sent to reviewers.
That’s SanDisk ruined for me. :-/