· According to detailed reports, in the cold winter of the storage industry, Western Digital and Japanese technology storage provider Kioxia "huddled together for warmth", and it is reported that merger negotiations have resumed and consultations on company mergers have resumed. Western Digital's planned acquisition of Kioxia, the world's second largest flash memory chip factory, cost US$20 billion. However, the prices of SSDs and mechanical hard drives plummeted, and manufacturers sold at a loss. Japan's trade ministry (METI) is also preparing to support a bid to merge Western Digital with memory chip maker Kioxia, provided control of cutting-edge technology remains in Japan, according to industry sources.
· Western Digital Corporation, a world-renowned hard disk manufacturer, was established in 1970, headquartered in California, USA, with branches all over the world, providing storage products for global users. Kioxia (Japanese: キオクシアKiokushia) is a computer memory manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, and the second largest NAND memory manufacturer in the world. It was once part of Toshiba. The Kioxia 240GB solid-state drive under Toshiba's quality assurance is less than 200 yuan.
· On the other hand, in 2021, ON Semiconductor will also acquire silicon carbide supplier GTAT for US$400 million, and the transaction is expected to be completed in the first half of the following year. Obviously, ON Semiconductor has successfully taken SiC wafers into its own hands. After the acquisition of GTAT, ON Semiconductor is continuing to invest in expanding SiC technology research and development. Does Western Digital put technology at the core like ON Semiconductor?
· In 2021, Western Digital and Kioxia will enter advanced negotiations on a merger transaction of more than US$20 billion, and Micron has withdrawn from the competition. At that time, it was reported that the 100 billion mergers and acquisitions in the chip industry fell through. The negotiations between Western Digital and Japan's Kioxia reached a deadlock at the time, and the memory chip changed. Until today, Western Digital's planned acquisition of Kioxia will take over 1/3 of the world's flash memory chips, shaking Samsung's NAND Flash throne; that is to say, Western Digital is expected to surpass Samsung to become the largest flash memory supplier!
In 2022, Japan plans to provide Kioxia and Western Digital with $680 million to boost memory chip production. At the end of the year, Kioxia also took advantage of its advantages and continued to lead; its new generation of UFS embedded flash memory devices have been delivered in batches. In addition, Kioxia RD20 is not afraid of slow down, giving users a real high-speed experience.
At the same time, it was revealed that Western Digital's trading center has been established for one year, and the planned transaction scale of its first batch of data assets exceeds 100 million yuan! Western Digital's WD Red Plus 8TB hard drive also won the "Excellent Product of the Year Award" in the Hotspot Technology 2022 Five-Star Awards. These achievements are inseparable from the extremely high cost performance of Western Digital products. For example, Western Digital's 1TB PCI-E4.0 M.2 solid-state hard drive only sells for 619 yuan, and users say it is crazy!
According to information from the storage industry, the ZDC report on storage products in 2022 shows that: 1TB M.2 solid-state drives have become the mainstream, and DDR5 memory is neither popular nor popular. In 2023, the memory chip market will continue to slump, and the demand for equipment orders will continue to decline. In the future, storage giants like Western Digital will meet the periodic challenges of the storage market with innovative momentum!
