Given that the news mention accelerated merge talks, how many days/months are we talking about?
If they are serious about this, why we are not spinning off the HD company yet?
Are we expecting big layoffs before or after the merge?
I'm just tired of been fearful my whole tenure here.
WD leaders love to talk about HAMR, mergers, and white knight investors, rather than the storage products that ship.
Similar to last leaders focus on HAMR, Risk-v, storage fiber, and mergers, rather than shipping products.
Not sure why they dislike the products that ship that generate the revinue that pays for their Apple CEO like bonuses.
There is not “a lot of HDD manufacturing in China” at least not WD.
Since a lot of HDD manufacturing is in China, expect the split to come after the merger.
That way what happens to HDD will be part of the negotiations with China.
When WD bought HGST China made spinning off the HGST desktop business a requirement. They could do something similar here.
I don’t expect China to approve but they recently took action against Micron and maybe they don’t want to narrow their supply lines. Even if China does not approve they should do it. They can choose to not sell there.
@1evi+1mSIbEDL, more market shares means more product lines. While it won't translate linearly, they will need more people. In other words, not everyone will survive. The overlaps will be gone, just like any other mergers. Some of them will be from Kioxia too I bet.
China ain't approving this. Not sure why our leadership don't get it
Why would they send WD Flash-BU engineering to Kioxia? Kioxia already has their own Flash engineering.
I expect an announcement this quarter.
When they are talking about accelerating the merge talk, it does not mean days or weeks. I would say it still in terms of months. That's just the talk. Once the terms are agreed upon and the merge process started, they would still need to get approval from a few governments (mainly US, EU, and China). That would take at least a year or two.
So we'll probably hear the decision in the second half of this year, and maybe the merge done mid 2024 or early 2025.
As far as HDD-SSD split, it would probably easier to merge first, figure out where the overlaps, and get rid of them. If we split first, then we'll probably need to hire non-engineering functions such as marketing/sales, HR etc. because we are forming two companies. And then if merge happens after that, they'll potentially have overlaps.
My guess is they would merge, and send all the Flash BU engineering to Kioxia. Just a guess.