On June 1, 2018, Bain Capital officially announced that it had completed the acquisition of the Toshiba Memory Division (TMC), which will later become an independent Japanese company.
Bain Capita said that the company will continue to help TMC to grow in the future, and through necessary capital investment, it will help TMC become an important part of the global memory supply chain. "We are confident in the strength of TMC and the potential for future growth."
This news also indicates that the acquisition of Toshiba's memory business was finally completed.
Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates and digital storage industry analyst, sent a statement through Forbes that since the differences between Western Digital and Toshiba have already been resolved earlier, TMC will be the world’s second largest manufacturer of flash memory that will be jointly owned by the two companies after the completion of the sale. Into a stable state. Western Digital is likely to have stable fab partnerships. Systems and equipment manufacturers such as Apple, Dell, Kingston and Seagate will also have direct access to flash chip supply channels, while SK Hynix will be able to obtain some of Toshiba's flash memory technologies.
However, Coughlin believes that the completion of the TMC sale does not mean that the flash chip market is concentrated. Instead, the market will have more players. “With the maturing of products like flash memory, this is an interesting reversal compared to the usual industrial integration.” He wrote, “The expansion of this number of players is driven by the rise of a number of Chinese flash memory manufacturers. Flash memory industry has not yet completed integration."
In the short term, the TMC sale will not have a significant impact on its own business. DRAMeXchange also believes that after the transaction is completed, the investment plans of Toshiba’s follow-up Fab 6 and Fab 7 will be able to proceed smoothly as expected, and sufficient capital investment will enable Toshiba’s flash memory sector to concentrate more on the research and development of new technologies. Western Digital maintains a good relationship of cooperation and continues to compete with Samsung in the NAND flash memory market.
