OCZ Announces Plans to File for Bankruptcy, Toshiba Set to Purchase Assets

The writing’s been on the wall for some time, and today’s the day when things come to a head: OCZ Technology has announced its plans to file for bankruptcy. Before pulling the trigger, OCZ is waiting for negotiations to complete with Toshiba, which is said to be interested in acquiring all of OCZ’s substantial assets.

At the moment, OCZ’s assets are under the control of creditor Hercules Technology Growth Capital, and should the Toshiba negotiations prove successful, it’ll make the purchase, and OCZ will then file for bankruptcy. Should the agreement not proceed for some reason, OCZ will still make the filing, but the outcome won’t be as good.

OCZ expects that the Toshiba agreement will complete, and for our friends who work at the company, it will be a great thing of the company agrees to the current requirements: Part of OCZ’s agreement is that employees be retained.

Since this announcement, OCZ’s stock prices have been in decline (-75% as of the time of writing, and since trading was allowed to resume).

For Toshiba, the acquisition of OCZ’s assets would greatly bolster its solid-state precence, so it seems likely that the company will want to see that negotiations are successful. In addition to OCZ’s general expertise surrounding SSD technology, it also has a firmware builder in-house (Indilinx) that greatly strengthens its overall portfolio.

As for everything else surrounding this announced bankruptcy, the future is unclear. If Toshiba takes control of OCZ’s assets (and employees), the company could very-well operate as normal for the foreseeable future. If this will affect OCZ’s precence at the forthcoming CES, we’re not quite sure; but we’ll undoubtedly find out soon enough.

We’ve been covering OCZ and its products for about as long as the site has been around, and over the years, we’ve developed some great relationships with the folks there. The past couple of years have been rough for the company, what with an ousted CEO and troubles with NAND shortages killing its revenue stream. It’s unfortunate to see that things have ultimately had to come to this.

Onto the next chapter… let’s see where things go.