Seagate Buying Samsung's Hard Drive Department

April 20, 2011 · by John Ponio

Samsung has recently been struggling in the hard drive market, and now Seagate will be buying up Samsung’s hard drive department for a whopping $1.375 billion USD, half stock and half cash. Key points of the transaction taken from the press release are:

Samsung combining its hard disk drive (HDD) operations into Seagate
Extending and enhancing the existing patent cross-license agreement between the companies
A NAND flash memory supply agreement under which Samsung will provide Seagate with its market-leading semiconductor products for use in Seagate’s enterprise solid state drives (SSDs), solid state hybrid drives and other products
A disk drive supply agreement under which Seagate will supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics
Expanded cooperation between the companies to co-develop enterprise storage solutions
Samsung receiving significant equity ownership in Seagate
A shareholder agreement under which an executive of Samsung will be nominated to join Seagate’s Board of Directors