Seagate Gobbles Up Lacie

Seagate has signed a deal to buy consumer storage vendor Lacie that values the firm at $186m.

Seagate, which recently completed the acquisition of Samsung’s hard disk unit and swiftly cut warranties on most of its drives to just one year, has now announced that it will buy hard drive packager Lacie. Seagate has signed an agreement with Philippe Spruch, Lacie’s chairman and CEO, to purchase his 63.5 percent stake in the company at $7.05 per share in cash, which values the firm at $186m.

According to Seagate the purchase should help the firm grow in Europe and Japan. The firm also announced that Spruch will be employed by Seagate and run its consumer products division.

Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, CEO and president said, “Lacie has built an exceptional consumer brand by delivering exciting and innovative high end products for many years. This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium branded direct attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development.”

Lacie’s fancy portable hard drives are popular among those who like fancy cases wrapped around bog-standard consumer hard disks. Seagate’s purchase of Lacie should see the firm not only become the sole supplier of hard drives in Lacie products but make a renewed push in the consumer portable hard drive market following last year’s floods in Thailand that affected the three big hard drive manufacturers.

Seagate said the deal should be completed by the third quarter of 2012 pending regulatory approval in the US, France and Germany.

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Seagate To Acquire Samsung’s HD Unit

Seagate Technology is to acquire Samsung Electronics  loss-plagued hard disk drive (HDD) business for $1.4 billion as it looks to battle rival Western Digital Corp and curb price wars that continue to damage the industry.

The deal comes a month after Western Digital sought to buy Hitachi Ltd’s hard disk drive division for $4.3 billion, to create a global leader with deep resources.

It is yet to be seen whether Western Digital trump Seagate as the world’s largest hard drive maker after the deals conclude. In 2010, Seagate’s sales was $11.4 billion while Western Digital posted revenue of $9.85 billion.

Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu are the other smaller players in the hard-drive space.

The sale of the HDD business will see Samsung leave the cut-rate industry and focus on its bread-and-butter memory-chip business.

The sector is already battling persistent sales-growth declines and now faces a longer-term threat from wireless tablet devices using more power-efficient flash drives, or solid-state drives (SSD).

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