Seagate completes Samsung HDD business takeover

Storage vendor Seagate Technology has completed its acquisition of Samsung Electronics’ hard disk drive (HDD) business, which was first announced in April 2011.

As part of the deal, Seagate has subsumed certain assets, infrastructure and employees. These assets include Samsung’s M8 line of 2.5″ HDDs.

Samsung employees joining Seagate include a number of senior managers and design-engineering employees from Samsung’s Korean facility, who will focus on development of small form-factor products for the mobile computing 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 Korean design centre, reporting to Bob Whitmore, Seagate’s executive vice president and CTO.

To ease the transition of products and technologies, 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. Customers can find more information at www.seagate.com/samsung.

The acquisition is part of several agreements between the two companies announced in April 2011. These include the supply of Seagate disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics devices; and the supply of Samsung semiconductor products for use in Seagate’s enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs), solid-state hybrid drives and other products.

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

“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.

“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 chairmanof Device Solutionsof Samsung Electronics.

The combined value of these transactions and agreements is approximately US$1.4bn, consisting of 45,239,490 Seagate Ordinary Shares and the remaining balance settled in cash.

Samsung will also designate a nominee to join Seagate’s Board of Directors.