14 DAY TRIAL // It's happened again. The culling brought about by the flagging PC industry and rising brand strength of rivals has brought about the end of a hitherto strong brand: OCZ Technology group.
OCZ has declared bankruptcy following the Wednesday trading day in New York, explaining why its shares were suspended earlier that day (yesterday as it were, November 27, 2013).
Basically, after five years where it failed to return any sort of profit, the company figured it might as well throw in the towel.
OCZ reported a loss of $125.8 million / €92.6 million, but generated revenues of $334 million / €245 million in the most recent fiscal year.
As a pleasant surprise, it also seems to be watching out for its employees. In fact, the company might have managed to stave off bankruptcy for a while it if cut its workforce some, but it decided against it.
Of course, it might have to do with the fact that OCZ isn't as large as, say, HP, Intel, Dell, etc., so it doesn't have hundreds of workers it can just dismiss.
Regardless of the reason, OCZ is making sure that its failure to stay afloat won't harm its workers, at least not immediately.
That's part of the deal with Toshiba, who has agreed to buy OCZ's assets: Toshiba has to keep all employees on board.
Mostly, OCZ's fall is owed to the inability to secure a constant supply of NAND Flash memory chips, which all SSDs are made of.
It's also implied that the company CEO didn't have interests that aligned with those of the company (Ryan Petersen supposedly killed a takeover deal by Seagate when he was denied a seat on the board).
This has turned out to be a good thing for Toshiba, who's been lagging behind Seagate and Western Digital ever since those two absorbed all other HDD makers (Samsung's division and Hitachi, respectively).
Having a better SSD portfolio will allow it to make up for its relatively low HDD share, to an extent (13-16%).