Although it’s unclear how much Hitachi will pay for this big slice of IBM’s hard drive business, the newspaper speculates it’s in the region of $1 billion, with the HDD unit worth around $3-$4 billion a year.
The article also suggests IBM would sell off the rest of its HDD business to Hitachi later on.
Which is all rather ironic, as it was IBM which first invented the hard disk in the 1950s, and the the Winchester hard file in 1973, as you can see by flicking to IBM storage history.
The move is another element in IBM’s apparent determination to get out of the PC and component business altogether, and comes after it issued a profits warning last week, partly blamed on a downturn in both the semiconductor and disk drive business.
It is unclear just what effect the deal with Hitachi will have on jobs at IBM factories worldwide.
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