Seagate Finishes Buying Samsung's HDD Division

Seagate has finally gotten past that short period of time when it was farther behind Western Digital than the world is used to.

Back when WD Bought Hitachi, it gained a share of about 50% of the whole thing, leaving the rest for Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung and others to divide amongst each other.

Considering that Seagate used to dominate the market not long ago, this was quite the change of scenery.

The company wasn't slacking, though, so it inked a deal with Samsung for much the same sort of buyout, although instead of buying the whole company it only took the HDD division.

Now, the last proceedings have been completed and approvals granted.

Seagate now owns assets, infrastructure and employees that previously belonged to Samsung.

Particularly relevant are the M8 2.5-inch high-capacity HDDs and senior managers and design-engineering workers from Samsung's Korean facility.

“Together, Seagate and Samsung have aligned our current and future product development efforts and roadmaps in order to accelerate time-to-market efficiency for new products and position us to better address the increasing demands for storage,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.

“It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing, cloud computing, and solid state storage.”

The transaction was originally announced back in April and is part of a whole list of collaborations between the companies.
Seagate can now enjoy a wider reach in China, Brazil, Southeast Asia and the Russian federation.

Besides that, it will be supplying HDDs to Samsung PCs and consumer electronics while receiving NAND Flash memory for its enterprise SSDs, among various other things.

“The strategic relationship will open new opportunities for the two companies by mutually complementing each other’s creative technology solutions for a broad diversity of IT applications,” said Oh-Hyun Kwon, vice chairman of Device Solutions of Samsung Electronics.