$40B invested between them & a 20Y 50/50 joint venture in place with in country R&D / Production facility.. I can't for the life of me see WDC letting that go and/or giving up market share tbh.. But at the moment they are a $22B company with $9B in long term debt.. That has to be cleared before they can move, and a SPAC proposition could well do that..
Or perhaps WDC can spin out the HGST development arm of the business.. Free up some cash to pay down debt and maybe even pick up a little tech offering to sit on the mantle piece.. ? Would only take a couple of key people to stand it up as a separate entity for sale, if it's not already? hehe
Got to be worth a few $B more now surely? 
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded on January 6, 2003, as a merger of the hard disk drive businesses ofand.Hitachi paid IBM US$2.05 billion for its HDD business.
On March 8, 2012,(WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of WD common stock valued at approximately $0.9 billion. The deal resulted in Hitachi, Ltd. owning approximately 10 percent of WD shares outstanding, and reserving the right to designate two individuals to the board of directors of WD. Citingconcerns, China'srequired HGST to operate autonomously from Western Digital, restricting outright integration between the companies' operations. As a result, HGST continued to operate independently with its own product lines and product development.
As part of the deal, Western Digital agreed to trade assets with, with Toshiba receiving assets for the production of 3.5-inch hard drives (1, 2 and 3-platter drives produced in,), in exchange for a Toshiba factory in Thailand for producing 2.5-inch drives (which had been inactive since the).
HGST would appear to have the license option so by doing so WDC could tie up the tech lock stock & Barrel and chase Kioxia, it may appear..
Sep 2016For the past two years, 4DS has had a strategic partnership with HGST, a subsidiary of NASDAQ-listed Western Digital (WDC, EV ~US$20 BN). The joint development agreement (JDA) was renewed for another 12 months in July 2016. As part of this agreement, HGST received an option to a nonexclusive license of the 4DS technology. Western Digital has publicly stated that 3D ReRAM is their technology of choice to address the Storage Class Memory market of the future.
HGST has value in that sense (20 yr non exclusive license option on disruptive tech$$$) over and above it's current intrinsic valuation which suits a spac merger to a tea as they require a little something extra to come to the table value wise so as to de-spac at the end..
Or they could just step aside and let Micron swallow Kioxia and take the tech out from under them seeing as how they finally worked out that
"Maintaining Cost & Performance whilst managing reliability isn't becoming, it damn well is the critical gate to product deployment"And for all the nervous Nellies worried about endurance & retention..... Chill M***erF***as we got dis...
I don't care what you all do in ya silicon valley hideaways, just show me the money you owe me you son of a gun...... Else you better have a damn good reason why not....
8tey,, out
System level error management... Critical & totally unique to 4DS
