Seagate snaps up LaCie

HDD company, Seagate Technology, plans to acquire storage company LaCie for roughly $186 million, as the hard drive maker looks to boost its presence in the consumer storage market, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Seagate is one of the biggest providers of hard disk drives, and it has been benefiting from rivals' woes amid severe flooding in Thailand that hindered drive manufacturing.

LaCie CEO Philippe Spruch and his affiliate have agreed to sell 64.5% of LaCie's outstanding shares to Seagate, InfoStor states.

Once that transaction is complete, and barring any regulatory hurdles, Seagate intends to buy the rest of LaCie's shares. The companies expect both parts of the deal to be completed in the third quarter of 2012.

Seagate remained fairly unaffected after the flooding in Thailand that wiped out most of major competitor Western Digital's factory stock last year, Digital Trends says.

In December 2011, Seagate also acquired Samsung's HDD business for $1.4 billion.

Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO, says: “This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium-branded direct-attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line, and enhance our capabilities in software development.”