Seagate Technology, a hard disk drives and storage solutions
company, announced it has acquired the hard disk drive (HDD) business of
Samsung Electronics.

Seagate has acquired select elements of Samsung’s HDD
business, including assets such as Samsung’s M8 product line of high-capacity,
2.5-inch HDDs, infrastructure and employees that enable Seagate to drive scale
and innovation.

Samsung employees joining Seagate include a number of senior
managers and design-engineering employees from Samsung’s Korea facility. N.Y.
Park, senior vice president and general manager, will serve as country manager
of the Korea design center, reporting to Bob Whitmore, Seagate’s executive vice
president and CTO.

With this acquisition, Seagate looks
forward to expand its customer access in China, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Germany
and the Russian Federation.

The combined value of these transactions and agreements is
approximately US $1.4 billion, consisting of 45,239,490 Seagate ordinary shares
and the remaining balance settled in cash.  Under the terms and
conditions, 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 companies have also extended and enhanced their existing
patent cross-license agreement and have expanded cooperation to co-develop
enterprise storage solutions.

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

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. It is an exciting time in the industry with
rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing,
cloud computing, and solid state storage,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman,
president and CEO.

Both companies also entered in to a series of other
agreements, Seagate will supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and
consumer electronics devices. Samsung is supplying its market-leading
semiconductor products for use in Seagate’s enterprise solid state drives
(SSDs), solid-state hybrid drives and other products.

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.

Earlier this year Seagate announced  that
it is delivering hard disk drive storage for the world’s first handheld tablet
computers with hard drives. The ARCHOS G9 8- and 10-inch tablets feature the
Seagate Momentus Thin hard drive, a speedy notebook drive with a super-slim 7mm
profile.

By Telecomlead.com Team

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