14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Seagate is still quite bent on becoming a private company, and though private investors seem to be getting cold feet, new rumors are suggesting that a rival HDD maker might end up buying Seagate off.
Currently, Seagate has market capitalization of about $6.7 billion, which means that any deal that ends in its acquisition will be a transaction of about $7.8 billion or more.
It has been a while since the HDD maker announced its intention of becoming private, but private investors have since lost interest.
Now, some new rumors have arisen which state that a rival supplier of HDDs might end up signing the deal.
This means either Toshiba, Hitachi or Western Digital, and whoever does it, if any, will end up creating the world's largest maker of hard disks.
The rumor arose in an article published by the New York Post, but it appears that analysts are not exactly all that inclined to see this possibility as very likely.
"It is possible, but the probability is very low. It is more likely that the rumors are just a way to signal bidders that there are other interested parties, and the time to make a deal is now,” said Kaushik Roy, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, in an interview with eWeek.
“It is a game. Steve [Luczo, the chief executive officer of Seagate] is not there to keep the job as a CEO. He is not going to sit idle until the deal is done. He wants to make money," he added.
Toshiba may seem like one of the more probably interested parties, considering that it bought off Fujitsu's hard drive business last year (2009).
As for the other prospective buyers, Hitachi is known to want to spin off its HDD unit and preparing an IPO, while Western Digital is not known as a company that performs large takeovers.
Regardless, whoever does make the deal will be responsible for the biggest technology acquisition of 2010.