OCZ's days are officially numbered as the company has reached an agreement to sell their solid state drive division to Toshiba for just $35 million. Specifically, the deal covers OCZ's client and enterprise solid state drive business which includes OCZ's proprietary controllers, firmware and software, as well as the teams responsible for bringing those solutions to market.
The transaction has been approved by OCZ's board of directors and is expected to close within the next two months. In the interim, Toshiba will be providing OCZ with DIP (Debtor-in-Possession) financing to ensure there is enough capital and flash support to keep the company afloat during the sale period.
OCZ's press release made no mention about the company's power supply business, however. If you recall, OCZ scooped up PC Power & Cooling back in May 2007 and has been offering power supplies ever since. It's one of the few lines that survived the product line cutback last year.
The sale also includes OCZ's established brand and sales channels although it is unclear if Toshiba will continue to use the OCZ brand or simply roll their technology into Toshiba-branded products. If I had to take a guess, I would suspect Toshiba would use their own brand instead of OCZ's as the latter has suffered some reliability issues in recent memory.
Vice President of Toshiba's Semiconductor and Storage Company and Corporate Vice President of Toshiba, Seiichi Mori, said the combination of their leading NAND technology with OCZ's SSD expertise will allow them to further strengthen Toshiba's SSD business.