Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) and Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) are the two top dogs in the hard drive business. While Seagate's merger with competitor Maxtor years ago should have helped quash Western Digital further, the latter has stayed strong and today has a share price Seagate can only dream of. Indeed, Seagate just tossed out Bill Watkins as CEO as the company tries to put the hurt on the competition. It just got a whole lot harder.Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba will acquire Fujitsu's hard drive business in a roughly $1 billion deal that gives all of Fujitsu's portable hard drive manufacturing capacity and technology to Toshiba. Since Fujitsu's main business is 2.5" hard drives used mostly in laptop PCs (yes, where PC growth has been for a while now) and it has a presence in the newer solid-state drives, this will further quench Seagate's problematic presence in the same market. Western Digital has just killed it at retail, selling the majority of these 2.5" hard drives as portable backup storage devices.
With Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi and now Toshiba being just about the only players left in the hard drive business, the next few years will be brutal but needed to help all four manufacturers shore up their market share and stabilize excessive price chops that helps none of them. Now, if Western Digital wanted to merge with Toshiba's hard drive division, things would get a whole lot more interesting, a whole lot quicker. With a down economy and sluggish PC sales, you never know.
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