Seagate: No Buyout Offer from Chinese Company

Seagate Technology, the worlds largest disk drive maker, told eWEEK on Aug. 28 that it has not received an offer to be acquired by any other company—foreign or domestic—and that it is not for sale.

A report in The New York Times on Aug. 25 had kindled speculation that a Chinese IT company had been interested in acquiring the Scotts Valley, Calif., hard drive manufacturer—one of only two such U.S. hardware makers. Western Digital, of Lake Forest, Calif., is the only other American disk drive manufacturer.

"Seagate CEO Bill Watkins told the New York Times that he was aware of growing interest in disk drive technology from companies located in China, Korea and Japan," Seagate spokesperson Michael Hall told eWEEK in a statement.

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"All of which are working in concert with their governments and have made disk drive storage a national agenda, and that in light of this, there were important public policy considerations that the United States government should be thinking about. Just to be clear, Seagate has not received such an offer, and we are not trying to sell the company."

People on several prominent discussion-focused Web sites —including Slashdot—presumed that Lenovo, the worlds second-largest hard drive maker, was the Chinese company that had approached Seagate. A spokesperson for the company had no comment Aug. 28.

Lenovo completed a $1.75 billion purchase of IBMs PC business in May 2005.

The possibility of such a transaction raises concerns among U.S. officials about potential national security risks regarding the transferal of such industry-leading high technology to China, the Times reported.

Read here about Acers recent acquisition of Gateway.

Seagate, which currently controls about 30 percent of the world market, has been by far the most dominant disk drive maker in the world for several years. On Jan. 23, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company reported the industrys first $3 billion quarter to go with whopping revenue growth of 30 percent over 2006.

The company on June 25 demonstrated its market leadership when it introduced what it called "the first second-generation," low-energy-use, 1TB-capacity storage hard drive —the Barracuda product line—for a variety of enterprise and desktop uses. It is also now shipping the industrys first encrypted laptop drives.

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