OCZ sold to Seagate for $1 billion

Edit: Seagate say they will not be acquiring OCZ, OCZ have stated a similar thing. OCZ’s shares have plummeted with this financially “bad” news – consumers can count themselves lucky this time.

We reported a while back that Seagate were looking to get their hands on OCZ. The value of the deal was not known, just that OCZ were valued at $300 million and Seagate were to have to pay considerably more than that for the acquisition,

An unofficial Seagate report has confirmed the deal has been finalised, for a staggering $1 billion – more than 3 times the market value of OCZ. This is great news for OCZ’s CEO, Mr. Ryan Petersen, who has managed to take OCZ from a DRAM memory module manufacturer worth $150 million per year to a successful SSD company worth more than $700 million each year.

However for consumers this is a deal that is going to be bad news. We’ve seen what both Seagate and Western Digital are doing in the hard drive market – artificially maintaining prices at high levels to keep revenue abnormally high. Now it seems Seagate will probably do something similar with OCZ. OCZ has always been the company to lead the market with the cheapest price SSDs, setting the SSD “bang for buck” standard. With Seagate at the helm, expect OCZ’s market leading price cuts to slowly fizzle out.

All that aside, hats off to OCZ and Ryan Petersen for making one of the most successful SSD companies in the world in the space of a few years.

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