Morning MJ.... See here's the thing about "the Dige", they've had aspirations for quite some time and don't mind a high value merger or two?
And with all the wheeling and dealing going on in the background who knows what comes out of it in the shape of new entities??
But I think if it goes in house (Sale & License of 4DS tech) they'll pay for what they receive fairly enough & let's not forget someone stumped up a lot of cash already (Circa $500m+) if 4DS is down at the lowest geometries on Imecs "State-of-the-Art" bench... 4DS didn't pay for that so there is some case for keeping the product with the sponsor & not letting the opposition have a bar of it.. 8tey
Western Digital Acquires NVMe-oF Startup Kazan
With the acquisition of Kazan Networks, Western Digital gets access to the startup developer of one of the industry's highest-performance NVMe-oF technologies thanks to Kazan's all-hardware design.
Western Digital in August of 2017 acquired Tegile Systems, a maker of flash storage technologies focused on enterprise data centers. The company was previously an investor in Tegile.
The company in October of 2015 acquired SanDisk in a $19-billion deal giving it a top-level flash storage technology.
2013 saw Western Digital invest heavily in flash storage with the acquisitions of sTec, Virident, Velobit, and Arkeia Software. The year before, Western Digital acquired Hitachi GST, or HGST, in a $4.3-billion deal.
If you were a firm-swallowing storage giant, how WD you digest them all?Branding, real estate need sorting out
Chris Mellor
Western Digital is chewing on agglomeration antacids as it continues to digest the 14 acquisitions made by the firm itself and its various business unit family members over the past decade or so.
The storage giant is seeing consolidation to nearline disk drives in its main revenue-earning business – and is also restructuring facilities.
It's also facing a considerable brand unification exercise to cut out overlapping and inconsistent branding.
How we got hereHere are all the acquisitions by WD and its own acquired units since 2009.
The two main transactions were WD buying HGST in 2012 as part of the disk drive industry consolidation process, and then buying SanDisk in 2016 to seriously get into the flash industry, with the SanDisk-Toshiba flash foundry joint-venture, and have a similar vertically integrated model to its disk drive business, spanning raw media to systems.
Each acquired business had its own facilities, front line, product line and back office staff, and branding. All these have slowly been consolidated into HGST and SanDisk, and now these two are being consolidated into WD.
Facility estate changesWe have already seen one facility change, with the closing of a Kuala Lumpur disk plant.
This followed on from WD relocating its headquarters from Irvine in southern California to San Jose in the Bay Area in April last year. It has facilities elsewhere in Silicon Valley – Fremont, Milpitas (SanDisk's old HQ), Newark and Redwood City. There are other facilities in the Boston area, Colorado and Minnesota.
The planned closure of a Marlboro, Massachusetts office was reported this month, plus that of facilities in Salt Lake City and San Diego.
Branding confusionAs a result of the two major and myriad minor acquisitions, WD has three major brand groups with a lot of overlap and inconsistent, non-uniform brand naming and imagery.
Here's an overview:
It needs a branding blitz to unify this mish-mash.
The branding scheme would have to cover the various product groups, and their application to consumer, prosumer, small, medium and large businesses.
Combining Western Digital and HGST disk drive branding would be a major step here, followed by combining the SSD brand schemes, which have three levels of overlap.
The Western Digital disk brands are based on colours, and HGST's are based on something-stars, apart from the various drive kits which are different from both colours and something-stars.
SanDisk SSD branding appears to bear no relation to its flash card branding, which has a Western Digital Purple microSD overlap.
There is evidence here of three separate product development organisations reporting to three individual business units, each with their own branding history and ideas.
Somehow this trio will be brought together and turned into a Western Digital product group family.
As we mentioned earlier, disk drives are consolidating to 3.5-inch high-capacity nearline drives and the firm will need a single integrated manufacturing system to sell drives to hyperscale buyers or to OEMs like Dell EMC/NetApp. These are sophisticated buyers and the storage giant wouldn't strictly need two main brand groups (WD + HGST). The Register storage desk sees HGST and WD coming closer together, with the latter brand likely retaining more prominence.
The reason disk drives are consolidating is flash; and SanDisk is vital to WD's future.
The joint venture with Toshiba for flash chip manufacturing, which WD bought into when it bought SanDisk, is the crown jewel. For now, SanDisk brands have more market presence than WD flash brands.
For those waiting to see movement on a unified product development and product pipeline as well as a unified branding, there are a lot of complex, moving parts to consider. Strap in, it's going to be an interesting ride. ®
GLOBALFOUNDRIES
In 2008, Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi government owned sovereign wealth fund assisted AMD in divesting their manufacturing assets and spinning them off. They were compensated with a combination of direct payments, investments in AMD, and shares in the new firm, GlobalFoundries. The divestiture was a multi-year journey, but by 2012, AMD was completely detached financially. AMD was still tightly intertwined due to the WSA (wafer supply agreements), but that is a story for another day. The GlobalFoundries spin-off helped keep AMD alive, but for Mubadala it became an endless money pit.
Mubadala paid $1.8B for Chartered Semiconductor, a large Singaporean Foundry in 2009. Mubadala continuously pumped in money on R&D, capital expenditures to keep fabs up to date on tooling, and even acquiring a new one. They eventually bought IBM’s chip making business, more on this later. Through the years, many missteps, bad investments, and business failures have caused them to lose over $22.4B! Many of the riches from oil money were squandered away, and now Mubadala is hoping to recoup the investment. GlobalFoundries is having an initial public offering. The valuation isn’t set in stone quite yet, but previous rumors stated $25B. That number very likely could be too high.
GlobalFoundries still retains many critical intellectual properties and is even the best in some niches, but the business itself doesn’t seem to be well run. It runs at an astonishingly low utilization rate of 84% in 2020. At the same time TSMC and UMC ran over 95%. Utilization rates are incredibly important in semiconductor manufacturing as there are an incredibly high number of fixed costs such as clean rooms, process R&D, and semiconductor capital equipment. These costs don’t change much as you ramp production up and down, so a well-run fab will run as close to 100% as possible all the time. While fabs like TSMC and UMC will go from making insane amounts of money to a moderate about when the cycle turns from shortage to oversupply, GlobalFoundries will look a whole lot uglier. The timing of going public is not a coincidence.
