Fujitsu Dumps HDD Head Business

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	29th Jan 2009

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While the evolution of SSDs continues at pace and traditional HDDs fight back with huge capacities it seems one company has different ideas.

Fujitsu has perhaps surprisingly announced this week it will discontinue its HDD head business from 31 March "as part of a broader strategic review of the HDD operations." For those not in the know, the head is the part used to read and write data on the hard drive.

In a statement it explained: "The HDD head development and manufacturing operations are currently performed at the Nagano Plant. The company will reassign plant employees working in the HDD head operations to other operations within the Fujitsu Group. The Nagano Plant also manufactures printed circuit boards for servers and telecommunications equipment, and will continue these operations after March 31."

As part of the discontinuation Fujitsu will recognise a one-time facilities related loss of 5bn yen (approx £40m) in the consolidated financial statements for its third quarter of fiscal 2008 ended 31 December 2008. It made no statement as to which company it will source heads from in the future.

Can we read anything into this regarding Fujitsu's attitude to the future of the HDD compared to the SSD? Well, you can but if you do I'd suggest it would be incredibly foolish. It's a recession people, it's called 'restructuring' and you'll be hearing that phrase thrown around a lot over the next 12 months.

Link:
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