It was months ago that Seagate said it would be buying Samsung's hard disk drive product division and, at long last, the European Commission has gone over the deal and given it its approval. Whenever a company says it wants to acquire another, or even just part of its assets, the deal needs to be approved by the appropriate legal channels.
When it comes to worldwide corporations, that means that the European Commission always has a say in the matter.
The primary concern when deciding whether to allow such a procedure or not is the level of competitiveness remaining in the market where the transaction is taking place.
After all, monopolies are famous for causing progress to lag because of acute lack of challenges.
Some time ago, Western Digital bought Hitachi, becoming the biggest supplier of HDDs in the world by far.
After that, Seagate inked a deal with Samsung, through which the latter was to hand over all HDD operations to the former.
This happened after a number of smaller HDD makers retired from the industry, which means that there will only be three big HDD makers once this deal is finalized. WD will keep the lead, followed by Seagate and, finally, Toshiba.
It is the EC's belief that, even with just three companies, there will be no shortage of competitiveness.
Then again, with solid state drives
getting to 1 TB capacities now, NAND-based storage alone is enough of a motivator for further HD research and development.
“The main impact of the transaction is on the markets for 3.5" desktop hard disk drives and 2.5" mobile hard disk drives where the investigation revealed that Samsung is not a particularly strong competitor,” reads
this official statement.
“The EU executive decided that with at least three suppliers, customers will retain sufficient possibilities to switch suppliers.”
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