Panasonic ponders selling its smartphone business to HTC or TSMC

 

Panasonic is considering selling its smartphone business, a report on Japanese news outlet Sankei Shimbun says. While that’s newsworthy in its own, the names of the potential buyers are even more interesting.
That report mentions HTC and TSMC as potential buyers. According to the report, the sale could go through if there will be no improvement on the financial front in the close future. The report also adds that the sale is apparently conditioned by the existence of an agreement in terms not only of price, but also of keeping the workforce.
For a long time, Panasonic made smartphones exclusively for the Japanese market, being a rather discrete presence in the rest of the world. However, the Eluga models, first shown last year at MWC, looked like sign of a comeback to the global market. Things haven’t gone in the right direction, really, and, even if the Eluga has received an Ice Cream Sandwich update in November, nothing much has happened since.
I frankly don’t know why HTC would buy Panasonic’s mobile business,  other than acquiring market share in Japan (let’s not forget that HTC has financial problems of its own).
On the other hand, TSMC could think about making phones based on its own chips, and that would make at least some sense.

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Western Digital Contributes To SSD Maker Skyera’s $51M Series B

Enterprise solid-state storage system maker Skyera announced that it received funding from Western Digital as part of its $51 million Series B round of financing. The two companies say the investment is an extension of a strategic relationship that includes joint technology development.

The money will be used to scale Skyera’s business across marketing, sales, and engineering, said chief executive officer Radoslav Danilak in a statement. Western Digital previously funded Skyera as its initial outside investor, and its other backers include Dell Ventures, which also contributed to this round of funding.

“One of our primary goals in developing strategic relationships with technology innovators in the broader storage ecosystem is to enable customers to develop highly optimized storage solutions that meet their changing data management needs,” Western Digital president and CEO Steve Milligan said in the press release.

Gartner estimates that corporations will spend $4.5 billion on solid-state drives, which offer quick and energy-efficient performance, in 2015, up from just under $1 billion in 2010, so it makes sense for larger tech companies to get in on the action. But Skyera does have plenty of competition from companies like EMC, Fusion-io, STEC, Violin Memory, and OCZ.

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