WD completes acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage

Western Digital (WD), a storage industry pioneer has completed the acquisition of Viviti Technologies (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) with effective from March 8th, 2012, for $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of WDC common stock valued at approximately $0.9 billion1.

At present, Hitachi owns approximately 10 per cent of WDC shares outstanding, and it has the right to designate two individuals to the board of directors of WD.

Post-acquisition, WD would operate with WD Technologies (WD) and HGST as wholly owned subsidiaries. Aggregated revenues of the two companies in 2011 were $15 billion.

As chief executive officer of WD, John Coyne heads up the new office of the CEO, with Steve Milligan as president, Tim Leyden as chief operating officer and Wolfgang Nickl as chief financial officer.