14 DAY TRIAL // Back when we wrote the first articles regarding the fake HDD crisis and the current HDD market status, there were many readers that correctly pointed out the fact that Toshiba is still manufacturing hard disk drives.
Although all the competition in the HDD domain was almost eradicated or bought off by Seagate and Western Digital, there are still some mobile hard disk drives that are built by Japanese corporation Toshiba.
Considering Toshiba a real competitor to Western Digital and Seagate in today’s market is like considering VIA a worthy adversary to Intel and AMD. Remember that VIA has less than 1% of the global CPU market.
As corrupt officials try to give the impression that they enforce the laws and that they want to still have real competition in the HDD domain, WD was demanded to hand off some assets to Toshiba so that the latter’s HDD division would have the ability to build 3.5” HDDs.
That’s quite amusing. The third so-called “competitor” was a one-legged HDD division only building mobile drives with practically no serious foothold in the desktop 3.5” HDD market. They didn’t even have the production capability, nor did they do any R&D-oriented toward the 3.5” HDD range.
In the eyes of the regulatory agencies, WD’s acquisition of Hitachi’s HDD division was ok if they’d give Toshiba some scraps so that Toshiba could pose as a 3.5” HDD manufacturer.
This was only done to fool the superficial people watching the show, as the reality is that Toshiba sold to WD a whole company called Toshiba Storage Device (Thailand) Company Limited (TSDT).
WD, on the other hand, only sold Toshiba “certain assets.”
Toshiba Storage Device Thailand manufactured hard drives prior to the recent Thailand flooding. Perhaps Toshiba will manufacture these future 3.5” HDDs somewhere else.
Remember, companies can only be put on trial for corruption is they bribe people and state agencies in countries where they have offices. If an American company wants to bribe an Arab official but has no offices in that country, the law can’t touch it and it has no interest in doing so.
So, make the international regulatory agencies look the other way and everything is allowed.
After all, an American company bought a Thailand-based HDD plant belonging to a Japanese company. Why should we care?
This only goes to show how “difficult” it was for Western Digital to extort us for 300% bigger HDD prices as during this last year, they had money to buy Hitachi’s HDD division and make 700 million dollars in profit and had money left to buy Toshiba’s HDD plant also.
We should thank the international regulatory agencies for building such a secure and competitive economic environment from which us, users can get 300% more expensive hard disk drives as benefit.