Western Digital Buys Sandisk

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Western Digital (WD) announces the acquisition of SanDisk for approximately $19 billion (in part acquired via Unisplendour investment), creating an enterprise and consumer HDD and flash giant.

WD SanDisk"This transformational acquisition aligns with our long-term strategy to be an innovative leader in the storage industry by providing compelling, high-quality products with leading technology," WD says. "The combined company will be ideally positioned to capture the growth opportunities created by the rapidly evolving storage industry."

SanDisk is the 3rd biggest maker of flash memory in the world, and is both known for both consumer (namely memory cards and USB drives) and enterprise (SSDs, PCIe flash, 3D chip development, systems components) storage, with expertise in non-volatile memory (NVM), solutions and manufacturing.

The acquisition does not affect the 15-year SanDisk foundry partnership with Toshiba, one WD says "provides stable NAND supply at scale through a time-tested business model and extends across NVM technologies such as 3D NAND."

Post-buy WD CEO Steve Milligan remains as overall leader of the combined company, while SanDisk CEO Sanjay Menrotra joins the WD board. The deal is expected to close by Q3 2016.

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