Western Digital has announced that it is going to acquire Sandisk for around US $19 billion. This move will finally make WD a worthy competition in the SSD market.

Western Digital has been struggling on the SSD market for quite some time and although the company had some enterprise SSDs on the market, offered by HGST, as well as some hybrid SSHD solutions, it did not have a proper consumer SSD. On the other hand, Sandisk, in a joint venture with Toshiba, which is one of the four major NAND flash manufactures, have been on the SSD market for quite some time.

According to Western Digital, this deal represents the next step in the transformation of Western Digital into a storage solution company with global scale, extensive product and technology assets and deep expertise in non-volatile memory (NVM) and it should double the company's addressable market as well as expand its participation in higher-growth segments.

Sandisk has 27 year history and expertise in NVM, which will be a great addition to Western Digital while WD has HDD expertise it also has an extensive distribution capacities.

Since Sandisk has been in a joint venture with Toshiba for around 15 years and WD is a direct competitor, Sandisk has also addressed this issue in a press release saying that the joint venture with Toshiba will continue as it provides stable NAND supply through a time-tested business model and extends accross NVM technologies such as 3D NAND.

The deal, which has been agreed by both sides, still has to be approved by shareholders and regulatory bodies. Western Digital expects the deal to be complete by Q3 2016. Recent analyst reports suggest that the SSD market is expected to exponentially grow until 2022 which suggest that this might be a big win and a very good deal for Western Digital.



Source: WDC.com.