Western Digital in merger talks with Kioxia

[HEXUS]

WDC share price surged on Wednesday, after a report about 'advanced stage' discussions.

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[Yoyoyo69]

This is a no brained for WD, taking out a competitor. It's a shame the monopoly increases, fewer and fewer manufacturers.

The remaining manufacturers are terrible too, so it does not bode well.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The irony that in the 1980s,Toshiba,as a high technology company., was targetted by the US as part of the Japan-US trade war. Now 40 years later,a part of Toshiba might be merging with a US high technology stalwart.

[LSG501]

While not really a big player, Kioxia was another player in the market which could maintain some sort of price competition.... I'm expecting overall prices to increase if this happens due to less manufactuers competing and the likely 'unrecorded chats behind closed doors'.

[QuorTek]

the two brands merged together could create somethign seriously good.

[Saracen999]

the two brands merged together could create somethign seriously good.

.... for their shareholders, maybe. For consumers? I'm not convinced.

[watercooled]

This is a no brained for WD, taking out a competitor.

It's not really a competitor, at least in technology terms. They co-operate in NAND production, a bit like Intel and Micron used to.

While not really a big player, Kioxia was another player in the market which could maintain some sort of price competition.... I'm expecting overall prices to increase if this happens due to less manufactuers competing and the likely 'unrecorded chats behind closed doors'.

Kioxia are a huge player, second only to Samsung in fact. Combined with WD, they are effectively equivalent in size.

[LSG501]

Kioxia are a huge player, second only to Samsung in fact. Combined with WD, they are effectively equivalent in size.

Weird because, while I know they've been multiple brands including toshiba before the spin off, they've never really been a brand that gets 'talked about' or suggested for builds etc from what I've seen at least.

If they are 'that big' then their merger with WD is arguably worse then because that basically makes the 3 biggest brands into 2 brands and as such less choice etc.

[watercooled]

They're not that recognisable in the retail sector, but their client drivers are very popular in pre-built systems from the big names, their NAND is widely used by the turnkey brands like Sabrent, Corsair, Adata, Kingston, etc, and they're also a major name in the enterprise space.

However, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) and WD (formerly SanDisk) co-operate on NAND development and production. BiCS4, BiCS5, etc are examples of this cooperation. It makes a lot of sense as a merger because of how they share technology anyway.

The SK Hynix purchase of Intel's NAND business looks a bit trickier, on the face of it, because they're quite different technologically.