When a company is forced to sell a highly profitable business in a high growth industry with very few players involved, everyone takes notice. With Toshiba’s memory business, a number of big names such as Western Digital, SK Hynix, Broadcom, Foxconn, TSMC and more have already entered bids for a majority stake in the company, but it looks like competition is about to get a whole lot more intense.
According to a new report from KoreaHerald, as many as 10 companies have entered bids for the Toshiba memory business including heavyweights such as Amazon, Apple, and Google. While these companies are traditionally not in the business of selling SSDs, they heavily rely on NAND flash for both the devices they sell as well as their datacenters. Apple for example secures a large portion of NAND for the iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks from Samsung, which will likely shift to Toshiba if the acquisition goes through. Similarly, both Amazon and Google utilize a significant portion of the world’s NAND to power their servers.
Currently, Samsung is the world’s largest NAND producer with 37% market share followed by Toshiba with 18%, Western Digital (formerly SanDisk) with 17%, Micron with 10% and SK Hynix with 9.6%.
Source: KoreaHerald
