Yesterday on the official website of the European Commission appeared a press release announcing the approval of the local authorities of the deal between Western Digital Corporation and SanDisk's, in terms of which the first will buy the second for $ 19 billion., Mostly using borrowed funds. WDC expects that all the formalities will be settled by mid-year, and look ready to integrate SanDisk offers in its line of solid state drives for the enterprise sector. This market segment the company believes the fastest growing - in the next few years it will grow by 25-30% per year in terms of revenue.
European Commission investigation which preceded the issuance of the verdict approving the transaction and SanDisk's WDC, was conducted in the normal way. After receiving official notification of the transaction the two companies registered in the US on 22 December the European authorities had 25 days to decide whether to give approval directly, or want to assign a more detailed investigation. The European Commission considered that the range of products and SanDisk WDC overlaps only in the sector of enterprise-class solid state drives, and the combined share of both players' roar will not be big threat to competition on the European market. According to the authors of the investigation, Intel, Micron, Samsung and Toshiba will continue to actively compete with WDC after absorbing SanDisk
In addition, European antimonopoly decided that the transition SanDisk under the wing of the WDC will not create problems for other recipients of solid-state memory chips.