Almost everyone has heard of SanDisk, as it is the third largest manufacturer of flash memory in the world. Consumers should recognize the brand from a bunch of products including memory cards in various formats, Solid State hard drives with high capacities, USB flash drives that are compatible with Wi-Fi connectivity or various mobile devices and even some MP3 players. The company also offers some business solutions to lower maintenance costs and energy consumption, those products include data center solutions, computing solutions and some professional imaging products. Now, according to a report from Bloomberg, the company might be looking to sell their business.
Currently, Micron Technology and Western Digital are said to be in talks about acquiring SanDisk, although the source remain anonymous as the process is kept private. Not to mention, as the reported talks are in an early stage, this might not turn into a transaction. Micron is also a supplier of flash memory while Western Digital specializes in making hard drives based on magnetic spinning disks, so the former company might be looking at SanDisk products to increase their portfolio while the latter might want to buy them to offer more storage solutions, as the capacity of flash-based memory is slowly rivaling the capacity offered by hard-drives.
In any case, since SanDisk operates plants in Japan with Toshiba, they might need to seek permission from this company before making changes to the structure of their business. The deal with Micron would have some complications as they currently have a technology partnership with Intel. Right now, none of the companies have made any official statements. Samsung is still the biggest supplier of memory chips, their memory modules can be found on many computers and mobile devices, including their own mobile division, which is very successful. Some of SanDisk’s offerings are extremely fast at writing and reading data, which might interest other companies like Google or Amazon to include these modules in their data centers. Merging some of this companies might result in better competition with Samsung’s current offerings and it could help them to develop new modules.