As earnings season starts to wind down and investors reflect on how the tech landscape is changing, it'd be easy to ignore one sector seeing the most dramatic changes: the hard disk drive (HDD) industry.
Among HDD makers, Seagate
Japan-related supply constraints took much of the blame for the disappointing results. That didn't hold Intel
What's a company to do? Make a deal! Concurrent with earnings, Seagate also announced that it agreed to take over parts of Samsung's HDD business for $1.375 billion in a 50-50 cash/stock mix. Samsung, in turn, will own 9.6% of Seagate and get a board seat. The companies plan to share patents and work together on new storage products. In addition, Seagate will supply HDDs to Samsung, and Samsung will guarantee a supply of flash memory chips (the kind used in tablets and SSDs) to Seagate.
Did you catch that? Samsung is "guaranteeing" flash supply to Seagate, but Seagate is merely "supplying" HDDs to Samsung. That seems indicative of where the trends and needs are going in the tech industry -- i.e., flash is encroaching on HDD territory.
The Seagate-Samsung deal comes on the heels of Western Digital's recent agreement to buy Hitachi's
Foolish takeaway
The Samsung deal strengthens Seagate's hand in an increasingly flash-centric world. It also drives HDD industry consolidation that could somewhat offset challenging industry dynamics. Assuming antitrust regulators don't block the deals, the WDC/Hitachi combination is expected to have about a 50% HDD market share, while the Samsung deal is expected to lift Seagate's share from 30% to 40%,.
Still, the real winner is Samsung. It's pursuing the more IBM-like strategy.
To stay updated on the storage sector, add any of the above companies to our free My Watchlist service today:
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- Add Western Digital to My Watchlist.