Seagate completes Samsung's HDD unit acquisition

CUPERTINO, USA: Hard disk drive vendor Seagate Technology announced the closing of the transaction to acquire the hard disk drive (HDD) business of Samsung Electronics.

Under the terms of the transaction, Seagate has gained select elements of Samsung's HDD business, including assets, infrastructure and employees.

Also Read: Thai floods hard drive shortage threaten PC sales

These assets include Samsung's M8 product line of 2.5-inch HDDs. Samsung employees joining Seagate include a number of senior managers and design-engineering employees from Samsung's Korea facility, who will focus on development of small form-factor products for the mobile compute market. N.Y. Park, senior vice president and general manager, will oversee Seagate's product development activities in Korea and serve as country manager of the Korea design center, reporting to Bob Whitmore, Seagate's executive vice president and CTO.

"Together, Seagate and Samsung have aligned our current and future product development efforts and roadmaps in order to accelerate time-to-market efficiency for new products and position us to better address the increasing demands for storage," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO. "It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing, cloud computing, and solid state storage."

This transaction was announced in April 2011 along with a series of other agreements between Seagate and Samsung.

The companies have also extended and enhanced their existing patent cross-license agreement and have expanded cooperation to co-develop enterprise storage solutions.

"The strategic relationship will open new opportunities for the two companies by mutually complementing each other's creative technology solutions for a broad diversity of IT applications," said Oh-Hyun Kwon, vice chairman of Device Solutions of Samsung Electronics.

The transactions and agreements substantially expand Seagate's customer access in China, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Germany and the Russian Federation.

Seagate will retain certain Samsung HDD products under the Samsung brand name for 12 months, and maintain or establish a number of independent operations including sales staff, key production lines and R&D.

The combined value of these transactions and agreements is approximately $1.4 billion.