History (1991): Storage Dimensions, Subsidiary of Maxtor, for Sale

Maxtor Corp. (San Jose, CA) announced it had retained investment banker Robert Fleming Pacific Inc. (Menlo Park, CA) to investigate options for the sale of its subsidiary Storage Dimensions Inc. or SDI (San Jose, CA).

“We wish for now on to concentrate our resources on our main activity, which is the design and manufacturing of Winchester and optical disks,” explains Laurence R. Hootnick, president and CEO, Maxtor.

SDI’s sales reached about $80 million and the company was mostly profitable since it first started out and afterwards since June 1987, when it was acquired by Maxtor.

The sale of the subsidiary will allow the manufacturer to bring out some cash after deficits of several quarters.

In FY91 ending June 1991, Maxtor reported $10 million losses for $224 million revenues.

SDI was established in 1985 by executives from Atasi like David A. Eeg, Gene Bowles, David Williams or Peter Shambora to address the storage needs of desktop computers being used in applications from CAD/CAM to accounting packages previously served by mini and supermicro computers. The firm offers a broad family of HDD and optical storage subsystems based on Maxtor and Maxoptix products.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠45, published on October 1991.

Note: Maxtor completed the sale of SDI to a management-led group for $18 million cash, a $4 million note and a 30% stake in the company on December 1992.