The next big merger? Western Digital wants to buy SanDisk!

According to rumors Western Digital would love to buy SanDisk for $19B. Multiple companies are interested in buying SanDisk, but it’s WD that seems to have the advantage. The deal will perhaps already take place during next week!

Micron also interested

Competitor Micron is also interested in buying SanDisk. Both Micron and SanDisk produce memory chips for use in Solid State Disks (SSD) and memory cards like your SD photo camera cards. However, Toshiba still has something to add to the negotiations, as they co-own the same factory and some intellectual property. Toshiba probably doesn’t want to sell their technology partner to competitor Micron.

SanDisk is currently worth about 15 billion US Dollar and this is quite an expensive deal, but on the other hand, some Chinese holding invested about 4 billion in WD about three weeks ago.

If the rumors are correct, the negotiations are already in a very advanced stadium. It’s expected that we will hear from this merger by the end of the week.

What would the impact be on the current Flash market?

For private users that use SD cards and memory sticks, probably nothing will change as it’ll just be a brand name change, but vendors that are bound to WD and Micron, maybe want to reconsider their contracts with either one as WD will now have their own Flash technology. Or the other way around: companies that used to have SanDisk technology and use another brand than WD, switching to WD might not be a valid option. What the future will bring, nobody knows yet, but we’ll see soon enough.

 

Read also: Techcrunch.com

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