Looking to gain a foothold in the solid state drive (SSD) market, Western Digital Corp. (WDC) has gained a significant piece of the puzzle by completing its acquisition of non-volatile memory and rotating magnetic storage vendor SanDisk.
The deal initiated in October of last year when WDC put a bid in for SanDisk to the tune of $19 billion. While WDC has made acquisitions for SSD products in the past, the SanDisk deal provides WDC with a stable NAND flash memory supply from the joint venture between Toshiba and SanDisk. This will help the disk drive powerhouse to gain traction in the SSD segment, where previous hard disk drive companies have been slow to make the transition to the rapidly popular, faster storage devices.
WDC no longer has to play catch up in the SSD market, and the combination now creates a potential powerhouse with a revenue stream rivaling that of Intel or Samsung. There will likely be some overlap in the product offerings between the companies as they compete in similar markets, but given SanDisk has a larger volume its resources may be of more importance compared to the smaller volume generated by some of WDC’s other acquisitions for SSD.
Steve Milligan will continue to serve as the CEO of Western Digital and its headquarters will remain in Irvine, CA. Sanjay Mehrotra, co-founder, president and CEO of SanDisk, will become a member of WDC’s board of directors.
To contact the author of this article, email engineering360editors@ihs.com
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Western Digital Completes SanDisk Acquisition
12 May 2016
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