The Rumor of WD Acquiring Fujitsu HDD Coming Back

To read this article from The Wall Street Journal (you need to subscribe), click on:

Japan’s Fujitsu Seeks Buyer for Hard-Disk-Drive Business

Comments

That the second time that this rumor is appearing. The first time, it came from the serious Nikkei Business Daily.

To read our comment at that time, click on: WD to Acquire Fujitsu HDD Business?

We met recently Seagate's CEO Bill Watkins. Concerning Fujitsu and WD, here are the Q&As:

There is a serious rumor of WD acquiring Fujitsu HDD, which would mean that together, they would surpass Seagate… Would you compete with WD?
To buy Fujitsu? NO! I’ll make you a bet they don’t buy them either.
Do you see more consolidation?
Yes. And if you think about it, the world right now, two things are going to happen. This sort of macroeconomics continues, we have a worldwide recession, so we’ll just hunker down and keep working. We think there will be an opportunity that will probably force a consolidation. Last year was the best year for disk drives ever. WD, Seagate and Hitachi made the most money they’ve ever made. Those other three companies, they didn’t make any money. So if they didn’t make any money last year, can you imagine what’s happening now, as this thing starts to really unwind a bit? And every time we’ve seen this kind of thing, there’s been consolidation. So the opportunity is that Toshiba and Fujitsu get together, maybe Samsung is left out, and TDK has to figure out what they’re going to do, if they don’t have anyone to sell the heads to. So we kind of look at this like, maybe this will be an opportunity for us, because there will be consolidation, or things get better and there won’t be consolidation, but things get better for all of us. What’s happened now, is three of us own 80% of the world market. Those other three have got to split 20%. They don’t have enough scale to be very competitive anymore.