Western Digital Corp. agreed to buy SanDisk Corp. for about $19 billion (¥2.26 trillion), gaining access to a supply of semiconductors that are at the heart of a fast-growing type of computer storage.
The drive maker will pay $86.50 a share for SanDisk, including $85.10 a share in cash and 0.0176 of a Western Digital common share, according to a statement Wednesday. SanDisk closed at $75.19 Tuesday in New York, giving the company a market value of $15.4 billion.
The acquisition gives Western Digital access to the growing market of NAND flash memory chips, which store data in mobile devices and are increasingly being used in hard drives in computing. Western Digital has seen revenue drop as the market moves away from older hard disk drives.