Toshiba to Buy Sandisk's Share in Joint Venture

Toshiba is said to have started discussions for a possible purchase of SanDisk's manufacturing facilities, as some voices from the Japanese market report. SanDisk is known as the largest supplier of flash drives on the U.S. market. Last month, the company received takeover bids from some of the industry players, including Samsung, which was refused. Also, rumors indicated that Toshiba was interested in acquiring the flash maker, but they were denied by the firm.

The two companies have flash memory manufacturing facilities in Mie Prefecture, based in Japan. The news brought by Nikkei says that Toshiba began negotiating with SanDisk for the purchase of its portion of the facilities as a response to Samsung's bid. The partnership between the two companies is a strong one, as they founded two joint ventures for the manufacturing of NAND flash memory. Toshiba owns majority in the ventures, while SanDisk accounts for 49.9 percent interest in each of them, but also funds R&D related to them.

Last month's buyout offer from Samsung came at a time when the Milpitas, Calif.-based SanDisk was on a descending route and was considered to be lower than the actual value of the company. Currently, Samsung owns the leadership in the solid-state drives market, a growing segment which, on the other hand, registers a price drop for flash memory products. Top flash memory producers were a little bit shaken during the second quarter of the year, and SanDisk was one of the five companies that registered decline.

SanDisk went down during the past two years, its profits diminished and its stock got below $60 per share. Since it became a rather vulnerable takeover target, a few companies showed interest in it, but were refused. Samsung came with a $26-a-share bid, but SanDisk's chairman and CEO, Eli Harari, said last month that the offer was “opportunistically timed at the trough of an industry-wide downturn”.