Published in News

Seagate probing OCZ acquisition

by on19 July 2012



Deal could bring both companies to the next level


Our industry sources came up with a rather interesting and hot story to close this scorching week. It turns out that hard drive maker Seagate is looking into the possibility of acquiring SSD maker OCZ.

It appears Seagate was not the only suitor, but acquiring this successful SSD maker would simply give Seagate a very strong presence in consumer, enthusiast and enterprise SSD markets. Seagate was late to enter the SSD market and OCZ has quite a bit of experience in the field. In the last few years it managed to carve out a respectable market share thanks to competitively priced consumer products as well as super-fast PCIe enterprise drives. The company always knew how to generate a lot of marketing buzz and in the meantime it even dropped its core RAM business in order to solely focus on SSDs. 

The marriage of convenience would also serve OCZ quite well. The company will benefit from Seagate’s vast resources and avoid quite a few issues. On some occasions OCZ found itself in the rather awkward situation of being unable to meet demand. That they could sell more drives that they could churn out, but having a big cash cow behind it would definitely help overcome such issues.

Micron and a few other companies were also in talks with OCZ about a potential acquisition. The financial aspects of the deal could also prove quite interesting. Our sources believe that Seagate plans to offer much more than $308.5 million that Nasdaq values OCZ (OCZ). Just to put things in perspective Nasdaq values Seagate (STX) at $11.71 billion.

The OCZ brand will most likely continue to exist within Seagate and a scenario under which OCZ continues as a separate company owned by Seagate is also possible. The deal could be announced before the start of next week and OCZ didn’t want to comment it at press time.

Last modified on 19 July 2012
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Read more about: