History (1989): Maxtor Hooking to Tractor, Kubota

The American company Maxtor and the Japanese one Kubota have set up a joint venture, Maxoptix, completely oriented on magneto-optical disks.

What on earth is the largest Japanese manufacturer of agricultural machinery doing here? It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last that it’s involved in computer-related market.

Already a shareholder of Ardent Computer, MIPS Computer and Exabyte, Kubota should be closely followed as it has strong means and the willingness of making a way in the minicomputer market.

75% of the shares belonging to Maxtor and 25% to Kubota, Maxoptix, the new company set up on a 5-year agreement will design, manufacture and market optical storage products.

For a $12 million investment, Kubota will acquire manufacturing rights and exclusive sales rights in Japan. In addition, it will provide $5 million for license fees, training and product development expenses.

The American company will retain exclusive rights to market the drives in Europe and in the Western Hemisphere.

Storage Dimensions, a Maxtor subsidiary, manufactures complete subsystems based on its main company’s disks and will market Maxoptix products to VARs, distributors and system integrators. The 50 people working in Maxtor’s optical division will now be working for Maxoptix, whose HQs will be at Maxtor’s offices in San Jose, CA.

The first product of this joint venture will be Tahiti, a 650MB or 1GB magneto-optical drive, announced by Maxtor a year ago, and should be available in 3Q89, later than what the U.S. company had announced. Maxtor will bring its know-how and built evaluation units while Kubota will handle volume production.

These kind of American-Japanese agreements already exist in the storage market. Maxtor’s Winchester disks are produced in volume by Matsushita. For WORM, it uses Ricoh technology.

Americans are also interested in Europe. A few weeks ago, deals that never came through, were supposed to lead to the settling of a Winchester disk plant in West Berlin, Germany, with Nixdorf.

The most surprising in all this is the newcoming of an almost one hundred year-old company, unknown until now in computer business. Kubota, the number one Japanese manufacture of agriculture machinery, chose in 1986 to turn the company in a different direction, from plowing to minicomputers, with intentions of making, beginning mid-89, half of its revenues with this new activity, when today’s sales amount to $5 billion.

To reach its target, Kubota didn’t spare its efforts. Mid-88, it invested $75 million to acquire from 5 different U.S. companies the necessary technology to produce its first minicomputer. Carefully, the Japanese company never buys more than half of the shares so that the American administration doesn’t complain.

It acquired 38% of Ardent Computer’s capital and manufactures all its super-minicomputers.

It owns 20% of MIPS Computer, a leader in RISC, also based in Sunnyvale, CA.

It also owns over 8% of Exabyte, a Colorado company specialized on mass storage on Sony’s 8mm tapes and its second manufacturing source in Japan for about half of its drive.

In the end, with millions of dollars, Kubota is putting together all the items to make its new dream come above its agricultural sector.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠14, volume ≠2, published on March 1989.