It was fun while it lasted, but Samsung has abandoned its bid to buy SanDisk. In a regulatory filing made nearly a year after its $5.85 billion offer for SanDisk was rejected as too low, Samsung officially called off the effort, which, had it been successful, would have combined two of the largest flash memory producers into a single NAND monstrosity.
Apple’s voracious appetite for NAND flash RAM has proven a boon to Toshiba. Discussing Apple’s latest earnings on a conference call with analysts Tuesday, company COO Tim Cook revealed that Apple and Toshiba have inked a flash memory deal worth half a billion dollars.
To the NAND flash memory business, Apple is a market maker and mover–and an increasingly insatiable one. In 2008, Samsung was forced to reduce its supply of 8GB-equivalent NAND flash chips to other customers to fulfill its obligation to Apple. What’s past is prologue. To wit, reports today claim Apple has placed an order for 100 million 8GB NAND chips from Samsung–an order so large it is reportedly causing a supply shortage.
The NAND flash memory supply may be headed for a bit of an early season drought thanks to Apple. According to a new report from ThinkEquity Partners, Cupertino has bought up all of Samsung’s flash RAM inventory up to April 2009, presumably in preparation for an iPhone refresh.
Apple is to the NAND flash memory business what Starbucks is to the coffee business–a market maker and mover. Particularly a mover. The company first shook up the NAND market back in 2005 when it arranged to purchase up to 40 percent of Samsung Electronics’ holiday NAND output. And now it’s creating a bit of a stir again.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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