Hitachi to sell HDD ops to WD for $4.3B

[robert213]

Financial news for those of you who prefer Hitachi Travelstar and Western Digital Scorpio HDD(s) in your laptop machines.

Instead of going public, Hitachi decided to sell their HDD operations to Western Digital for $4.3B. This will give Western Digital 50% of the HDD market. Hitachi will have a 10% ownership stake in WD. Seagate owns another 30%. Together, WD and Seagate will own 80% of the HDD market.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41946293
http://www.cnbc.com/id/41946167

[RealBlackStuff]

That is eventually a dying market, what with SSDs gaining market share.
The rats are leaving the sinking ship...

[Unknown_K]

More likely there just isn't any money making hard drives anymore. If you consolidate the market some more you can then jack up prices to be profitable. SSD drives will not take over the deskop market for a very long time because of cost vs space. I remember when Maxtor was around selling tons of drives but making no money, they had purchased Connor but that didnt help them out much in profit. Anyone who collects old computers could name off half a dozen drive makers who died off in the 90's to now (JPS, Micropolis, Maxtor, Conner, Quantum, IBM, Fugitsu, etc).

So 50% is WD, then 30% Seagate so whats left? I got a Samsung 2TB HD last year for $69 shipped, nice drive for storage.

[automobus]

Anyone who collects old computers could name off half a dozen drive makers who died off in the 90's to now (JPS, Micropolis, Maxtor, Conner, Quantum, IBM, Fugitsu, etc).
So 50% is WD, then 30% Seagate so whats left?

You already mentioned Fujitsu as dead: it is now Toshiba. So, only four disk makers that I know of: Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital.

[ajkula66]

On another note...IBM did not die as a hard drive manufacturer, but sold their operations to Hitachi...

[Unknown_K]

Quite a few dying or unprofitable companies ended up being purchased by another in the industry.

[ajkula66]

Unknown_K wrote:

Quite a few dying or unprofitable companies ended up being purchased by another in the industry.

An article from back in the days...

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/ar ... -Staff.htm

The problem with IBM's PC concept altogether was that they most certainly had proven what was possible, but failed to be profitable at it...