The Samsung/SanDisk Courtship
Well, as was reported here last week, Samsung made an offer to purchase flash memory powerhouse SanDisk for nearly 6 Billion Dollars ($26 a share), a sizable bonus from their current depressed stock price.
However, SanDisk rejected the offered dowry as too low, to which Samsung immediately acted like a spurned lothario, saying that SanDisk thought too highly of itself and was lucky to get that good an offer, that no one else would want them, and they should take what they could get and consider themselves lucky that all their little Sansas would have a name. SanDisk then responded officially with the equivalent of “Nuts!” and made clear they are open to any other company who can beat Samsung’s offer and has their own car and prospects in their father’s business.
SanDisk’s attitude is not totally unfounded, as Toshiba has been tossing pebbles at SanDisk’s window and playing the lute in the moonlight under their veranda, but they have yet to make an offer and may not have the financial security to do so. Surely other companies will follow now that the Sadie Hawkins Dance is underway.
Where is all this going? Well, I am quite sure that some company will buy SanDisk, and it will probably be Samsung in the end. SanDisk is trying to delay them in hopes that the current doldrums will pass and their stocks will rebound, upping the price (on news of all this, they already rose 40 percent to 21 a share). Samsung wants to get the matter over and done with before that happens. For the Korean electronics giant, buying SanDisk will save them nearly 400 million a year in royalty fees for SanDisk’s patents right off the bat, so the pickings are certainly worth the effort….even should the price go up. This is all just brinkmanship for them.
However, there is yet another wrinkle, in that this will be a deal very very difficult to get past anti-trust regulators. Anytime a manufacturer purchases one of their major suppliers, alarm bells go off that even Theodore Roosevelt could hear. In this case, the thought that Samsung will suddenly be able to get NAND memory effectively free AND charge their competitors for the same, giving themselves incredible marketplace advantages, would be giving the US and EU chills.
Written by Zealot · Filed Under General
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