Toshiba Reaches Agreement to Acquire OCZ’s Solid State Drive Business

As a follow-up to our OCZ / bankruptcy story from last week, negotiations with Toshiba have concluded, and it’s a done deal. For $35 million, Toshiba will absorb “substantially all” of OCZ’s solid-state drive assets, which includes its proprietary controllers, firmware, software, the teams that make the magic happen, and access to the brand itself and the company’s sales channels.

OCZ’s CEO Ralph Schmitt states:

Over the past year, OCZ has dealt with numerous issues which have stressed the company’s capital structure and operating model, posing a challenge to achieving near term profitability. The combination of NAND flash supply constraints and credit issues have impacted our ability to satisfy the demands of our customers; this combined with increased pricing pressure in our industry have contributed to our on-going operating losses. On an operational basis, we completed a complex investigation, several restructurings and a multi-year restatement that added significantly to our working capital requirements,. We have been working diligently on this partnership with Toshiba and we believe that this is the best outcome under our current corporate conditions.”

Worth noting is that nothing is being said about OCZ’s power supply business, so we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen to that. OCZ is the sole owner of PC Power & Cooling, which produces its own line of PSUs as well as OCZ-branded ones. Since PCP&C’s acquisition, releases have rolled out at a slower pace than what was previously expected, so it’s our hope that that brand will come out of this unscathed, perhaps even if it has to go independent again or sold to another party.