Seagate to acquire Mac storage provider LaCie for $186 million
Mac peripheral maker LaCie announced on Wednesday that it will be acquired by hard drive maker Seagate for $186 million.
The all-cash deal is valued at 4.05 euros per share, with Seagate to acquire 64.5 percent of LaCie's outstanding shares from Philippe Spruch, the company's chairman and CEO, as well as his affiliate. The offer from Seagate values LaCie at 146 million euros, or $186 million U.S., including acquired net cash of about 49 million euros, or $65 million U.S., as of March 31, 2012.
The two companies said the acquisition will combine two highly complementary product and technology portfolios, adding LaCie's premium consumer storage solutions and network-attached storage products to Seagate's consumer storage products. Seagate sees the deal accelerating its growth strategy in the consumer storage market, particularly in Europe and Japan, as well as adding engineering and software capabilities.
"This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium-branded direct-attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.
If the deal is approved, Spruch would join Seagate and be in charge of the company's consumer storage products organization. Luczo said Seagate is excited to have Spruch, who he called "a true visionary and leader," to join their business.
"With the proliferation of devices and content being shared and stored today, consumer demand for high-quality branded storage solutions continues to grow," Spruch said. "We are excited about the potential for this combination to benefit customers and employees by creating significant scale and opening up new markets. We look forward to making the resources of a much larger company available to our customers around the world."
LaCie has been a major supporter of Apple's Mac platform over the years, and last June was one of the first companies to unveil a Thunderbolt-based external solid-state drive. Apple launched the high-speed Thunderbolt port on its Mac lineup last year.
Last September, LaCie began shipping the first Thunderbolt hard drives priced under $1,000. The Little Big Disk can be purchased through Apple's online store, and starts at $399.95 for 1-terabyte.
The all-cash deal is valued at 4.05 euros per share, with Seagate to acquire 64.5 percent of LaCie's outstanding shares from Philippe Spruch, the company's chairman and CEO, as well as his affiliate. The offer from Seagate values LaCie at 146 million euros, or $186 million U.S., including acquired net cash of about 49 million euros, or $65 million U.S., as of March 31, 2012.
The two companies said the acquisition will combine two highly complementary product and technology portfolios, adding LaCie's premium consumer storage solutions and network-attached storage products to Seagate's consumer storage products. Seagate sees the deal accelerating its growth strategy in the consumer storage market, particularly in Europe and Japan, as well as adding engineering and software capabilities.
"This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium-branded direct-attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.
If the deal is approved, Spruch would join Seagate and be in charge of the company's consumer storage products organization. Luczo said Seagate is excited to have Spruch, who he called "a true visionary and leader," to join their business.
"With the proliferation of devices and content being shared and stored today, consumer demand for high-quality branded storage solutions continues to grow," Spruch said. "We are excited about the potential for this combination to benefit customers and employees by creating significant scale and opening up new markets. We look forward to making the resources of a much larger company available to our customers around the world."
LaCie has been a major supporter of Apple's Mac platform over the years, and last June was one of the first companies to unveil a Thunderbolt-based external solid-state drive. Apple launched the high-speed Thunderbolt port on its Mac lineup last year.
Last September, LaCie began shipping the first Thunderbolt hard drives priced under $1,000. The Little Big Disk can be purchased through Apple's online store, and starts at $399.95 for 1-terabyte.
Comments
The one company I trust acquires the company I trust the least. This is not good news to me.
Good job Seagate. Now maybe LaCie will get rid of those crappy Western Digital drives they insist on using and increase their product quality.
With the new company to be named LaCiegate. I'm actually surprised by the low selling price.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tikiman
Now maybe LaCie will get rid of those crappy Western Digital drives they insist on using and increase their product quality.
So you don't want them using Seagate drives in their products, even though they're owned by Seagate?
Quote:
Originally Posted by tikiman
Good job Seagate. Now maybe LaCie will get rid of those crappy Western Digital drives they insist on using and increase their product quality.
I did not know WD was crappy. I've been using Caviar Blue, Green & Blacks for several years with absolutely zero failures. I really like WD quality.
Like the ones in the Mac Pro
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/726517-REG/Apple_MC729ZM_A_1TB_SATA_Hard_Disk.html
Edit: I see you are from Colorado which probably explains your opinion since that is a big Seagate location
I've generally thought Seagate had less quality than other drive manufacturers. Western Digital has always been on the top of my list for quality, particularly if you get their black drives, but they do tend to be a bit pricy.
The drives that LaCie used were not generally the problem. Their power-supplies were, which failed too often.
When Hitachi bought G-Tech it was a good thing. G-Tech, an enclosure-maker like LaCie, had power-supplies that failed too often too.
Now the G-Tech drives are buy-able again, IMHO.
Hopefully LaCie will inherit some technical smarts from Seagate.
LaCie has been around for many years, and this may again lengthen their life.
If I gave up on a company because I had a drive fail, there wouldn't be anybody left for me to buy a hard drive from. I've had equal opportunity bad luck. Conversely, I've had drives from just about every company that performed without a flaw.
I was just about to say, I wonder if they'll call the new company LaCiegate. Haha. And I agree, the price seems surprisingly low, but maybe that's because I've become accustomed to hearing unrealistically huge numbers for tech companies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jmgregory1
With the new company to be named LaCiegate. I'm actually surprised by the low selling price.
I was just about to say, I wonder if they'll call the new company LaCiegate. Haha. And I agree, the price seems surprisingly low, but maybe that's because I've become accustomed to hearing unrealistically huge numbers for tech companies.
Buy them and take the best of them and use it then dissolve them and move on.
The computer market is declining the last year or so - and many of the laptops are switching to SSDs. The volume hard drive business has a questionable future. At best, it will be stagnant.
The reality is, no matter if you can buy a 1TB HDD for $100 vs 100GB SSD, if you only have <100GB of data then you don't need to go with a slower drive.
The vast majority of people will have less than 256GB of data so when it hits 50c/GB, the consumer hard drive market will dry up. Sure WD and Seagate can hold on for a while as a lot of people do need tons of storage but it's all down to price.
SSD = $1/GB
HDD = 10c/GB
Then there's this:
http://hexus.net/tech/news/storage/39645-silicon-reram-spotted-track-2013/
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/02/21/forget-ssds-here-comes-reram/
Persistent RAM. No more loading data into RAM and no more expensive RAM. 256GB RAM = 256GB of storage. Roll on 2013.
This is a really sad news. Seagate drives are the best to lose data. Too many horror Seagate drive stories by now. Noisy, heat monsters. I rather want LaCie with Hitachi inside. What a shame!!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
The computer market is declining the last year or so - and many of the laptops are switching to SSDs. The volume hard drive business has a questionable future. At best, it will be stagnant.
for consumer use I agree, SSD is the way it will go but with cloud storage becoming so fashionable, huge amounts of disk arrays are still needed. As personal storage become less local, it will become more cloud based. There certainly won't be any less data to store in the future. I can imagine that eventually all spinning platters will be in disk arrays in a data center.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Fix
The one company I trust acquires the company I trust the least. This is not good news to me.
You trust Seagate?
Seagate are crap. Of all the drives I've come across aside from Maxtor (which Seagate owns), Seagates fail the most. They are pathetic.
In 15 years of IT support the drives that have failed the most go something like this:
Maxtor
Seagate
Hitachi
Samsung
Fujitsu
Western Digital
in that order.
Not saying the others don't fail but they don't fail as much as the first two.
There aren't a lot of external drives I trust very much. I haven't seen one by a typical hard drive brand that instilled confidence, usually I use someone else's enclosure. It costs more, but the drive brands really seem to cheap out on their enclosures, or add unnecessary gimmicks that don't work.
I've had dozens of Seagate drives and they were all quiet, cool and reliable. I don't think I've had to replace one due to a failure, overheating, noise or other undesired operation.
I certainly agree with you. This is just another case of the big fish swallowing the little fish and greed prevailing. Seagate has not made excellent drives for a long time and it's sad that Lacie took the bait.