14 DAY TRIAL // After many months of wrangling with the various authorities that need to approve business deals, Western Digital has finally finished the process of acquiring Hitachi GST.
That means that WD is now officially the largest supplier of hard disk drive units in the world, even if it had to give up some manufacturing facilities.
The European Commission is the one that imposed the condition that WD sell some parts of its business, to preserve competitiveness.
Nevertheless, WD will benefit greatly in the end, despite all the billions it had to spend, because it now has a much larger customer base and technological portfolio.
"With a significantly broadened customer base and expanded resources, the new WD is in a strong position to seize the growth opportunity in stored digital content," said chief executive officer of WD, John Coyne.
"We have acquired a strong presence in the traditional enterprise market, substantially increased our presence in the industry's fastest-growing segments—cloud and mobility—and improved our capability to address new market initiatives such as enterprise SSD, storage solutions for small business and low-profile HDDs and hybrid drives for Ultrabooks. As a result, WD is better positioned than ever for success."
Recently, WD and Toshiba swapped factories, so to speak, in a way that made the former's situation easier in Thailand.
The deal with Hitachi involved more than that: WD had to relinquish a 10% stake and allow Hitachi to have two people in the board of directors.
"The completion of this acquisition is a truly momentous event in the 42-year history of our company," said the CEO.
"With ownership of two successful companies and the best talent available in the industry, we expect to accomplish great things as we build the new WD to be the world's leading storage solutions provider with the industry's deepest technology capability, broadest product portfolio and best-in-class execution. Similar to successful multi-brand models in other industries, the two subsidiaries will compete in the marketplace with separate brands and product lines while sharing common values of customer delight, value creation, consistent profitability and growth."