14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Seagate's decision to no longer listen to proposals of acquisition ended up preventing the most gigantic HDD-making company from coming into existence.
One might say that each market segment has two representatives that have been locked in a rivalry for years.
The CPU market has Intel and AMD, the GPU market has AMD and NVIDIA, the PC market has HP and Acer/Dell, etc.
Needless to say, there must have been some end-users that at least once asked themselves what would happen if said rivals merged together.
Of course, this hasn't happened, but the HDD market seems to have been quite close to this very sort of event not long ago.
Seagate recently said that it wanted to become a private company by being bought off, only to later give up on this initiative.
Now, it is revealed that one of the proposals it got came form none other than Western Digital, the so-called Arch-rival in that market.
Apparently, WD has even offered to pay 10% to 50% more than what TPG Capital offered, which was $7.5 billion, more than Seagate's actual market capitalization in late November, of $6.5 billion.
Had this deal happened, a veritable giant of HDDs would have been formed, which would have instantly become the holder of more than 60% of market.
On the other hand, they would have had to deal with overlapping product lines and may have run into problems with antitrust organizations.
"There’s way too much product overlap, and I’m not sure the premium would be meaningful enough to make it worth it. I think they have to make a go of it on their own," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw LLC.
As one would have expected, Seagate and Western Digital did not comment on the report in anyway, at least not yet.