Breaking news in technology industry tonight, Western Digital have just announced they are acquiring the storage section of Hitachi. This means the number of hard drive manufacturers just decreased by 1, big news ! It turns out hard drives are big business.. WD will buy Hitachi for US$4.3 billion, made up of 3.5 billion in cash and 25 million shares at a value of $750 million.
As we move from the traditional platter-based hard drives to a new era of solid-state storage, the combined resources of WD and Hitachi should make for an interesting future in this space. As with any acquisition, there’ll be efficiencies (read layoff), but as hard drive consumers the power of two R&D departments combining should make WD a serious competitor in the SSD market.
To give you basis for comparison on the size of the deal, Adobe paid $3.4 billion for Macromedia back in 2005, while Intel Acquired McAfee for $7.8 billion last year.
