The Western Digital, the world leader in digital storage solutions, has decided to sell some materials and intellectual property to Toshiba in exchange of the factories damaged by the tsunami that hit hard last October Thailand.
These are the conditions that have convinced the Antitrust Authority to consent definitely the acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, it plans already declared previously by WD, and that he had put the views of programmers Hard Disk Drive in great turmoil, causing various reactions from Also in the same Antitrust Committee that is why he started to investigate to see if other manufacturers minor they could suffer excessive disadvantages from this move.
The investigations have led to the conclusions, which provide that Western Digital will have to sell some properties the material and intellectual unspecified Toshiba and the Japanese company in turn will sell its factories damaged by the tsunami in Thailand.
In this way, Toshiba, manufacturer with lower turnover, would benefit from some of WD technologies, while the latter will benefit from the many factories available once repaired the damage.
Although the full terms of the agreement were not disclosed specifically, many sites talking about it and it seems that Toshiba would acquire some equipment for the production of 3.5-inch hard disk drives for the consumer world and server applications.
Although the market situation in general today is quite clear, in the sense that to continue with technological development combined with competitive prices for the final product are necessary technologies, ultra-proven and continuous patents, it is almost impossible for a new the manufacturer may find space in this type of market. In fact, to keep this lucrative sector, as well as many others, there are strategic moves that today appear almost justified: mergers, acquisitions and partnerships of companies also competing with each other.
In this case, however, the agreement was a must because after the WD has announced the acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (one of the main competitors) and given the small number of production holdings hard disk present on the market, the Competition Authority sought to avoid dominance of WD that crush the competition following the agreement and imposed to be bound by strict rules materialized in the transfer to Toshiba of the foregoing.
