Irvine’s Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., the U.S. division of Tokyo-based Toshiba Corp., bought a hard drive design center in Fremont, the company said Thursday.
The facility, acquired from Panasonic Shikoku Electronics Co. Ltd., a unit of consumer electronics maker Matsushita Electric Industrial, will help Toshiba put “critical resources closer to Toshiba customers,” the company said in a statement.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
“Acquisition of this design center greatly bolsters our global engineering organization and represents Toshiba’s commitment to driving innovation in small form factor hard disk drives,” said Scott Maccabe, vice president of Toshiba’s storage device division.
The facility will focus on making microdrives for use in consumer electronics devices such as MP3 players and laptops. Sales of these kinds of drives are expected to soar in the coming years as consumers snatch up such electronics.
Toshiba now competes more directly with Lake Forest-based Western Digital Corp. in this market. Last year, Western Digital came out with drives for portable computers after exiting the market in the late 1990s amid heavy competition.
As part of the deal, approximately 50 Panasonic engineers will join Toshiba.
