Rumor: Seagate rejected Western Digital takeover bid

[Emil]

In October, Seagate reportedly rejected a takeover bid from rival Western Digital. If the proposition had gone through, it would have resulted in another huge hardware company. Western Digital was willing to offer as much as 10 to 50 percent more than a competing takeover proposal from TPG Capital, which had already put more than $7.5 billion on the table for Seagate, according to two people with knowledge of the matter cited by Bloomberg.

It appears that the sheer size of the merger was largely responsible for its refusal. A merger would have created a huge amount of product overlap, led to numerous management departures, not to mention the many potential antitrust problems. Seagate has a market value of about $6.9 billion, and while Western Digital has smaller sales, its market value is at a larger $8 billion or so. Unsurprisingly, neither company was willing to comment on the news.

Last week, Seagate ended acquisition talks and started buying back $2 billion of its own shares. Talks collapsed after TPG Capital couldn't find other partners to raise the required amount for the takeover. For now, it looks like Seagate is content with continuing on alone.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/41451-rumor-seagate-rejected-western-digital-takeover-bid.html

 

[Guest]

Overall, Seagate HDD's are junk. If Western Digital bought Seagates, I would never be able to buy a another WD drive with any confidence.
---Dwheel

 

[Benny26]

Guest said:
Overall, Seagate HDD's are junk. If Western Digital bought Seagates, I would never be able to buy a another WD drive with any confidence.
---Dwheel

Had my 2 old seagate's years...No smoke so far

 

[Guest]

Eventually all technology will be in the hands of very few companies, which will mean the end to innovation and competitive pricing.
Doesn't anyone in government realize that we need anti-trust enforcement?
I worked for DEC-Compaq-HP for 25 years and have seen good technology innovators get gobbled up and many VERY good engineers lose there jobs.
-****

 

[Regenweald]

Guest said:
Overall, Seagate HDD's are junk. If Western Digital bought Seagates, I would never be able to buy a another WD drive with any confidence.
---Dwheel

Had a WD Scorpio 160 gig up and die in a friends laptop after about 2 weeks of use. A HD is a HD, brand loyalty or not, it's really just the luck of the draw with QC. I myself am a WD buyer, but if I'm getting a good deal on Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba or Hitachi, brand loyalty goes out the window.

 

[gwailo247]

I've found that whenever I was in the market to buy a drive in the last two years or so, WD has always provided a good price, and I've always been pleased with their performance.

I did get a Seagate 1.5 TB drive, first one of their products I've used in a few years, and so far it works. But it sure does spin loud and sure makes a lot of loud clicks that none of the ten or so WD drives I'm using do, so I'll have to see how long it lasts.

 

[Route44]

Had my 2 old seagate's years...No smoke so far

Same here. My two old Seagate's are doing just fine.

 

[Stupido]

I'm only loyal to my hard earned cash... branding of for fanbois

 

[Guest]

Overall, Seagate HDD's are junk. If Western Digital bought Seagates, I would never be able to buy a another WD drive with any confidence.
---Dwheel

haha, liked what you said.

 

[Guest]

Seagate did well in refusing the merger; i mean both Seagate and WD are giants in the HDD and etc market, so if both of them joined there would no longer be any new innovation, creativity, marketing, pricing, and comparison which is beneficial to us customer in many way. It's the same case for them: if both merges, it's all about money but they don't get much of the value proposition OVER the other competitor which in this case is each other.

 

[PanicX]

Guest said:
Overall, Seagate HDD's are junk. If Western Digital bought Seagates, I would never be able to buy a another WD drive with any confidence.
---Dwheel

Baseless nonsense. Seagate is the vendor of choice in the enterprise market. Often times I'll have clients with failed drives that they need data recovery. Every time I drop by the drive service shop I ask the guys that work with busted drives all day which drives they recommend. For the 7 years I've used their shop they pick Seagate as their number 1 choice. Western Digital used to be second but they've recently dropped it to third after Samsung now.

Guest said:
Seagate did well in refusing the merger; i mean both Seagate and WD are giants in the HDD and etc market, so if both of them joined there would no longer be any new innovation, creativity, marketing, pricing, and comparison which is beneficial to us customer in many way. It's the same case for them: if both merges, it's all about money but they don't get much of the value proposition OVER the other competitor which in this case is each other.

While I agree that Seagate did well in refusing the merger, I think that even if it went through, there wouldn't be any room to rest on the innovation, creativity and pricing. The SSD market is a very real threat to both these companies and will force them to compete.