Seagate gets its hands on Samsung's hard disk business

Hard-disk manufacturer Seagate has entered into a partnership with technology company Samsung to take on its hard disk drive business for £843m.

The duo has described the partnership as a definitive agreement under which they will "align their respective ownership, investments and key technologies".

In addition to Samsung's hard disk drive operations becoming part of Seagate, the two have signed a NAND flash memory supply agreement under which Samsung will provide Seagate with its semiconductor products for Seagate to use in its enterprise solid state drives (SSDs).

They have also signed a disk drive supply agreement under which Seagate will supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics and said that they plan to co-operate closely to co-develop enterprise storage solutions.

In addition, Samsung will receive a "significant" equity ownership in Seagate. Seagate said that it paid Samsung a combined total of $1.4bn (£843m) for these transactions and agreements, and Samsung will receive 50 per cent of the value in stock and 50 per cent in cash.

The move strengthens Seagate's business just weeks after competitor Western Digital acquired another competitor in the hard disk drive space, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, in a deal reported to be worth around £2.3bn.