Western Digital has announced plans to split in two, more than a year after activist investor Elliott Management pushed the US data storage company to make such a move.
The $14bn tech group said on Monday it would spin off its flash memory unit from its hard drive business. The announcement comes days after it emerged that Western Digital had abruptly abandoned long-running merger talks with Kioxia of Japan, formerly Toshiba’s semiconductor unit, which is owned by a consortium led by Bain Capital.
South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, another investor in the Kioxia consortium, said last week it opposed a merger with Western Digital, dealing a blow to Bain’s ambitions to create a US-Japan memory chip champion.