Toshiba wraps up Fujitsu HDD deal

TOSHIBA HAS officially completed its takeover of Fujitsu's hard drive business with the formation of the Toshiba Storage Device Corporation (TSDC).

The deal was originally broached in February with a definitive agreement announced at the end of April.

Although Toshiba isn't paying anything for the business, it is sucking up a $60 million hit from previous (Fujitsu) operating losses.

Now all the necessary legwork has been done and dusted and the data transfer is complete. For the time being Fujitsu will keep a stake of just under 20 per cent of TSDC while it shows Toshiba where the pet food is kept and how often to water the plants. In due course its stake will be transferred wholly over to Toshiba.

TSDC is a Toshiba Group subsidiary and itself has four subsidiaries spanning Japan, Thailand and the Philippines, with a total of around 8,000 employees.

With the cost of solid state drives starting to plummet while their capacity continues to increase some are predicting that the days of traditional spinning disks are numbered, but it's still going to be at least a few years before SSDs overtake HDDs on a large scale. µ