Looks like the rumor mill was right. Western Digital is buying SanDisk for $19 billion, or $86.50 per share, according to a joint announcement by the companies this morning. WD says that the takeover will give it "deep expertise in non-volatile memory" and allow it to play in "higher-growth segments"—code for SSDs, we're guessing.
SanDisk's joint venture with Toshiba will be carried on as part of the deal. WD says continuing the partnership gives it access to a large, stable NAND flash supply, and it also says that it'll get a competitive advantage by vertically integrating that flash into its operations.
The deal will be financed through cash, debt, and Western Digital stock. The hard drive maker expects to take on $18.4 billion of new debt as part of the buyout. WD CEO Steve Milligan will continue to lead the combined company, while SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra will join the WD board of directors. If all goes well, the companies expect the deal to be complete by the third quarter of 2016.
Western Digital really has become the Borg of storage. Let’s hope they don’t wreck SanDisk the way they wrecked SiliconSystems; they’ve done this “let’s acquire some SSD IP and expertise” once already, and it did not end well.
So that would make Seagate the Dominion of storage eh?
My Sandisk Sansa Clip+ died last weekend. It made me very sad.
I bought a spare when they ended production and prices on remaining stock started to edge up. I should be good for a few more years, provided the battery holds up.
Why the sadness here? I’ve had great experiences with Western Digital. When things went south, their RMA process is one of the easiest I’ve dealt with.
The best media company in my experience over the last 20 years, period.
I’m totally basing this on my anecdotal experiences, not any hard data, prefaced thus.
I don’t understand it either, I’ve had nothing but great products and service from both companies. The two seem like a natural fit. Granted, WD get more out of the deal than SanDisk, but I guess that’s why they’re buying. Duh.
Look at it this way: if WD lets Sandisk operate as usual, then everything is good; if they stick their fingers into the technical operations of Sandisk to possibly ‘reduce operating costs’, the whole thing may go to crap.
And one of the worst I and many other Australians dealt with – if a drive failed, WD’s RMA process was for the customer, at their own expense, to send it to [i<]overseas[/i<] service centre. Have also noticed they've taken contact details provided during RMA and shared them with their marketing department (two years after an RMA, the unique e-mail address used for RMA started getting WD Store spam).
well this sucks pretty bad.
there goes my 10 year extreme pro ssd warranty!
Damnit, there goes the storage industry.
There is a chance that they may regret this purchase, if the upcoming xpoint tech from Intel takes off and eats into the NAND margins. Just a thought.
“Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser, agreed Sunday to accept a $52 billion buyout offer from Belgium’s InBev, home to brands such as Stella Artois and Beck’s”
I think this says all you need to know about where our priorities lay.
Fact: That’s been some number of years now. However, AB InBev has extended an offer, and it has been accepted to purchase SABMiller, makers of Miller (Light), Fosters, etc.
Sauce: [url<]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-Busch_InBev[/url<]
If you’re suggesting my priority is beer, then… Yes. Yes it is.
After what WD and Seagate did to the HDD market I won’t touch anything sandisk now.
What are you smoking?
Thai floodsticks.
Well, there goes one of the goodies. Too bad. I guess I should be happy it’s not Seagate.
Little did you know…
[url<]http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/mas/seagate-acquires-wd-for-16-billion-new-company-named-seawest/[/url<]
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.
[quote<]Western Digital buys SanDisk for $19 billion[/quote<] Holy Crap. I mean, SanDisk likes to charge a premium for the name, but I can get you a much better deal on Amazon than $19 Billion!
We’re in the middle of a consolidation war. Next week, facebook will buy amazon for $42 billion, Dell/EMC will buy facebook for $198 billion, twitter will buy facebook for $493 billion, instagram will buy twitter for $787 billion, zynga will buy instagram for $912 billion, AMD will buy zynga for $1367 billion, valve will buy AMD for $3.333 trillion and EA will buy valve for $5 hojillion.
You can’t rule out the possibility that AMD buys out, then admits it paid too much, claims a one time loss of 912 billion on its quarterly reports and shutters the business.
Then Google will buy them for 1 googol!!
[quote<]We're in the middle of a consolidation war. [/quote<] That's what happens when we force interest rates at nothing-point-nothing percent; the business logic of bulking up on astronomical amounts of debt just make sense. There's a dangerous angle to this, for business and governments both: as they binge on debt which central banks intentionally make cheap, central banks lose the ability to take away the punch bowl, because it could directly cause a wave of bankruptcies, meaning the longer this goes on the more central banks lose power. Anyway, at least this deal has a certain logic to it, WD has partly fallen off the tech radar in light of SSD prices falling.
yeah but the people causing the shots will be fine no matter what.
Yeah, I was about to say something similar but featuring AMD, Adobe, Oracle, LG, ARM, Google, Samsung, MS and Apple, in this order, approximately. It has become so easy to tell the future using nothing more than extrapolation, right?
Also, ftfy: X will spend less money to buy AMD than AMD will spend to buy Y beforehand.
Is SanDisk, still considered the supplier for must USB flash/SD cards (not SSD) to other vendors (Samsung and such)? I ask, because I remember that most were re-branded items.
Exactly what I was thinking. The SD card business was something that Sandisk pretty much owned (patents IIRC).
Indeed. IIRC, they have even invented a nice filesystem specifically intended for flash-based drives.