SanDisk (SNDK) stock shot up 12% in late trade Tuesday on reports it is putting itself up for sale. Micron Technology (MU) and Western Digital (WDC) are seen as possible buyers. The buzz comes as chip M&A activity has heated up, with some major deals. SanDisk, which has struggled in the past two years as sales to Apple (AAPL) have waned, has hired a bank to advise on a possible sale, sources told Bloomberg, which initially reported the story.
Chinese Tsinghua Group’s $3.8 billion investment in data storage firm Western Digital (WDC) might signal the death knell for a rumored deal with Micron (MU), Rosenblatt Securities said Friday. Buzz circling SanDisk (SNDK) and Toshiba might also be overblown, Rosenblatt analyst Jun Zhang wrote in a research report. “We believe SanDisk and Toshiba are unlikely targets,” he wrote. “Micron is still attractive to Chinese PEs, but we think the decision
Teardowns of the Apple Watch are revealing which chip companies won Apple’s (AAPL) business for the new smartwatch. ABI Research broke open a sealed S1 processor in the Apple Watch to learn which chip companies supplied components. In a report posted Thursday, ABI said that the S1 chipset included chips from Broadcom (BRCM), NXP Semiconductors (NXPI), SanDisk (SNDK) and STMicroelectronics (STM). The brains of the Apple Watch also included chips from AMS, Dialog Semiconductor, Integrated Device Technology (IDTI), Analog Devices (ADI) and the Elpida unit of Micron Technology (MU). Those chips run the gamut from wireless communications and flash memory to sensors. “A few of (the) key surprises in the design are two touch-controller design wins for ADI and the IDT wireless charging receiver,” ABI said. One loser was InvenSense (INVN), which lost the accelerometer-gyroscope component business to STMicroelectronics, the tech company Chipworks reported in its teardown….