Lake Forest-based disk drive maker Western Digital Corp. is selling a Malaysia parts plant to Japan? Hitachi Ltd.
Terms of the sale, expected to close by the end of next month, weren? disclosed.
The plant makes what are called media substrates, the underlying part of a disk that stores data within a drive. The plant? workers are set to join Hitachi.
Western Digital is moving substrate production to another plant in Malaysia.
The plant sale is part of a restructuring announced by Western Digital in December, when the company said it was cutting some 2,500 jobs and executive pay in a bid to offset slumping demand for disk drives.
Western Digital is faring the best of the major disk drive makers during the sector? downturn.
It? shares have doubled since fall? meltdown on Wall Street with a recent market value of $5.5 billion.
The company reported results for the three months through March that exceeded Wall Street? expectations.
Western Digital competes with Hitachi, though the Japanese company is a more distant rival. Western Digital is the No. 2 drive maker after Northern California? Seagate Technology LLC, which earlier this month announced plans to lay off 1,100 workers.
In April, Western Digital paid $65 million to buy Aliso Viejo? SiliconSystems Inc., a maker of a new type of drive that is starting to take business from traditional disk drives.
Drives from SiliconSystems and Santa Ana? STEC Inc. are called solid state since, unlike a disk drive, they have no moving parts and use flash memory chips to store data.
