OCZ Files For Bankruptcy While Toshiba Readies Its Offer For Buying The Company

OCZ has issued a press release announcing their filing for bankruptcy, which was expected since Nasdaq had halted the trading of OCZ stock. They have had financial issues for quite a long time and it was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened. While OCZ did try to change its course by reforming their product portfolio, it seems that the efforts weren’t enough to make the business profitable.

OCZ leaves behind a noticeable amount of assets, most importantly its engineering teams in California, South Korea and Great Britain thanks to the prior acquisitions of PLX and Indilinx. Toshiba has already offered to buy OCZ’s assets but currently there is no certainty on whether the deal will be completed. Toshiba’s offer is, as expected, subject to various conditions such as retention of the employees because it obviously makes no sense to buy the assets unless Toshiba also gets the immaterial capital that is integrated into the employees. We’ll have to wait and see how the deal turns out but at this point I recommend not buying any OCZ products because there is no guarantee that warranties will be honored.

OCZ has been one of the pioneer manufacturers in the consumer SSD industry. They were one of the most active companies when we started to see the first consumer SSDs in 2008 – 2009 timeline, but OCZ lost a ton of sales once Samsung and other major OEMs began to take the consumer SSD market seriously. It’s hard to say what ultimately killed OCZ without knowing their exact cost structure but I believe it was a combination of bad strategy and engineering choices along with other things.

What happens to OCZ now depends on the completion of the Toshiba deal. Even if Toshiba completes the purchase of OCZ’s assets, the OCZ brand will be no more. The deal with Toshiba should work out as OCZ has a lot of potentially useful assets, one of them being OCZ’s Indilinx Barefoot 3 platform.