Western Digital in Advanced Talks to Merge with Kioxia in $20B-Plus Deal | Hacker News Reader

Western Digital in Advanced Talks to Merge with Kioxia in $20B-Plus Deal

wsj.com

15 pointscm21877 comments

The whole thing is strange I will need some time to read into how the heck did it all happen. Knowing the Japanese it is possibly another one of those management issues. But in fairness it make sense since WD is the largest customer of Kioxia. And Kioxia is having difficulties competing with Micron and Samsung.

1. Toshiba make NAND, in partnership with SanDisk.

2. Sandisk and part of those NAND asset sold to Western Digital. Along with long term purchase agreement etc.

3. Westinghouse fiasco happened, nearly brought Toshiba down to Bankruptcy.

4. Toshiba had to spin out their most valuable business which was their NAND.

5. Due to its sensitive nature, having any other NAND player buying Toshiba NAND would likely not pass regulation. And most current customers would like Toshiba to stayed independent, so a JV was formed and if I remember it had Apple, Dell, and many other computer vendors contributing money to the fund.

6. Somehow Westinghouse wasn't as bad as they thought, now Toshiba dont feel comfortable selling its NAND business, so after long "discussions". Toshiba Memory was spin out with the JV owning 49% of the company with ( if I remember correctly ) little voting right. While Toshiba owning 51%. i.e Nothing much has changed.

7. Somehow decided that JV and partnership didn't work ( or not ), rebrand itself as Kioxia and has a different US Fund owning it.

8. After a few years finally decided it wasn't much fun with NAND. May be we should have just give up and sell it to WD. As WD has originally proposed a long long time ago...

What more do they want? They've already gobbled up HGST, makers of the world's finest hard disks. I really hope some fool of a MBA doesn't wreck their ultrastar brand which used to be the HGST range.

China of all places was the only one thinking about competition and forced WD to give up HGST assets to Toshiba. Now WD gobbles up Toshiba ...

> I really hope some fool of a MBA doesn't wreck their ultrastar brand which used to be the HGST range

Too late. They tried to get rid of HGST and UltraStar brand and failed. So now they are still selling the same thing.

I love HGST hard disks. They don't die as much as WD and Seagate ones do.

Yes. WD did a rebranding exercise to try and get rid of HGST and UltraStar, not only did the retail channel and wholesale channel backfire, a certain large enterprise customer insist on the same HGST and UltraStar HDD, same model number, basically same everything. While HD could certainly ignore retail and wholesale, they cant ignore enterprise. So you still see UltraStar, and in many cases Wholesale are still calling them HGST.

I'm very glad that has happened, I can still buy these disks.

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