Today Seagate announced its intentions to acquire Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion in stock, once again consolidating an industry where razor thin margins brutally penalize any missteps. Here, though Maxtor’s enterprise division has done relatively well, the firm’s desktop/consumer division has struggled to regain its footing after some quality-control issues centering around the DiamondMax 8/9 series.
Expected to formally complete over the summer of next year, the move certainly creates an industry behemoth, strengthening Seagate’s leadership position and leaving competition in the SAS/FC space to the HDD divisions of sprawling Japanese conglomerates Fujitsu and Hitachi. The latter, of course, along with relatively tiny US-based Western Digital and Korea’s Samsung, remains as Seagate’s rivals when it comes to SATA units.
Discuss it here.
