Toshiba has reached an agreement with their NAND production partner Western Digital to sell their memory division to a consortium led by Bain Capital, helping the beleaguered company to offset some of its losses elsewhere. For Western Digital this is a bit of a mixed bag. The purchasing consortium contains competitors like SK Hynix, making their shared assets awkward to say the least.
However, Western Digital fought a hard bargain on the deal. There will be no exchange of IP, something they were extremely nervous about when Toshiba initially announced the deal. And they’ll be able to match investment on new production facilities to essentially buy out the consortium’s interest over time.
This combined with Samsung’s $26 billion CapEx commitment on DRAM and NAND fabs hopefully will increase overall NAND supply and competition in the long term. While this won’t alleviate the NAND shortage overnight, it’s good to see the Toshiba NAND business fire sale seemingly won’t exacerbate the situation.
We discussed Samsung’s massive investment on our latest Gestalt IT Rundown, make sure to check it out!
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Read more at: Western Digital, Toshiba And Bain Capital Settle Disputes Over Sale Of Toshiba Memory
