Indian co-founder of SanDisk enters billionaire club after a whopping $19 billion deal with Western Digital
Sanjay Mehrotra must be a happiest man in California today. He along with fellow founders Eli Harari, and Jack Yuan could now list in world billionaire list after selling SanDisk to Western Digital. The world’s largest storage manufacturer announced today that the company has cleared all the necessary regulatory hurdles in their planned purchase of SanDisk.
The mega deal comes on back of negotiations going on for 9 monhts. For a cool $19 billion, Western Digital now gets to call SanDisk their wholly owned subsidiary. Although SanDisk might be best known for flash memory cards and USB sticks, the company has lately entered into diverse products like enterprise notebook hard drives and also builds OEM memory components for Apple and Nvidia. Western Digital also stands to own around 5800 patents that SanDisk held worldwide. The flash memory maker’s patent portfolio is consistently recognized as one of the strongest in the technology industry.
Both Western Digital and SanDisk are headquartered in California, but today’s final regulatory announcement comes from China’s Ministry of Commerce.
In a statement, SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said his company, “look[s] forward to contributing to the success of Western Digital as it transforms into the leading storage solutions company.” The deal will officially buttoned up for good on Thursday, May 12th.
The shareholders in SanDisk however did not take the news sportingly as the stock is trading negatively since the markets opened today.
