Toshiba, the world’s second largest producer of solid-state drives after Samsung, is reportedly in talks to buy Fujitsu’s hard disk drive business. The deal, which analysts estimate could be between $340 million and $450 million, would include Fujitsu’s hard disk manufacturing and sales networks and two manufacturing plants in Thailand and the Phillipines.
Fujitsu has consistently generated operating losses in its HDD business and has been trying to offload it for some time now in order to focus on IT consulting. Should the deal be completed, Toshiba would become the world’s largest producer of hard disk drives, and its massive scale would likely bring down unit costs.
But Tatsuya Mizuno, a director at Fitch Ratings, says it’s not that simple citing “price volatility”, especially as solid-state drives become more popular. Currently SSD’s are much more expensive than HDD’s, but are promising because of their low-energy consumption.
2.5-inch hard disk drives are often used for storage in GPS navigation systems, netbooks, and laptops.
