August 27, 2007
Memory failure
The supposed Chinese bid to buy a US disk drive company gets more and more curious. It all started over the weekend, when the New York Times quoted Bill Watkins, ceo of Seagate, as saying that an approach had been made - though he wouldn’t say who had made it, or to whom. For good measure, he added that people were "freaking out" about this in Washington DC, since control of advanced disk drive technology could help the Chinese plunder US secrets.
Since Seagate and Western Digital are the only remaining US disk drive makers (IBM having sold out to Hitachi), and since it was Watkins making these comments in public, this seemed to point a finger directly at Western.
So what does the famously loquacious Watkins have to say for himself? He was said by the company to be travelling today, but Seagate issued a clarification to say that, for its part, it "has not received such an offer and we are not trying to sell the company."
Without denying the weekend’s story, it went on to try to distance Watkins from the report:
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins told the NY Times that he was aware of growing interest in disk drive technology from companies located in China, Korea and Japan, all of which are working in concert with their governments and have made disc drive storage a national agenda, and that in light of this there were important public policy considerations that the United States government should be thinking about.
That’s far from a denial, though. Western Digital continued today to refuse to comment. Whether or not it is considering a sale, it can’t have helped Western to be on the receiving end of comments like these from one of its biggest competitors.
