Western Digital in advanced talks to buy memory chipmaker SanDisk

Western Digital Corp, one of the world's largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers, is in advanced talks to buy memory chipmaker SanDisk Corp, which has a market cap of $14.7 billion Bloomberg yesterday reported, citing people knowledge of the matter.

Western Digital has so far prevailed over other suitors like Micron for SanDisk, and talks are still ongoing, the report said.

Western Digital is discussing a price of between $80 and $90 per SanDisk share, whose share price closed at $72 in New York yesterday.

SanDisk, led by Sanjay Mehrotra, co-founder, president, and CEO, is one of the largest makers of flash memory used as storage in mobile devices, computers and data centers.

The California-based company has more than 8,600 employees worldwide and manufacturing facilities in China, Japan and Malaysia.

SanDisk has sales, operations, and research and development centres in the US, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates.

More than half the company's $6.628 billion sales are generated outside the US.

With a market cap of $ $22 billion, Western Digital is one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world, along with Seagate Technology.

Founded in 1970 by Alvin Phillips, a Motorola employee, as General Digital, it soon became one of the storage industry pioneers.

The company designs and produces high-performance hard drives and solid state drives. Its storage products are marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers.