OCZ Files for Bankruptcy, Toshiba Offers to Buy the Assets

[Arthur]

OCZ finally get what they deserve!

 

Sources: AnandTech, Ars Technica

 

OCZ has just issued a press release announcing their filing for bankruptcy, which was expected since Nasdaq had halted the trading of OCZ stock earlier today. OCZ has had financial issues for quite a long time and it was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened. While OCZ did try to change its course by reforming their product portfolio when Ryan Petersen, the former CEO of OCZ, stepped down, it seems that the efforts weren't enough to make the business profitable.

 

OCZ leaves behind a noticeable amount of assets, most importantly its engineering teams in California, South Korea and Great Britain thanks to the prior acquisitions of PLX and Indilinx. Toshiba has already offered to buy OCZ's assets but currently there is no certainty on whether the deal will be completed. Toshiba's offer is, as expected, subject to various conditions such as retention of the employees because it obviously makes no sense to buy the assets unless Toshiba also gets the immaterial capital that is integrated into the employees. We'll have to wait and see how the deal turns out but at this point I recommend not buying any OCZ products because there is no guarantee that warranties will be honoured.

 

It's sad to see OCZ going because they've been one of the pioneers in the consumer SSD industry. They were one of the most active companies when we started to see the first consumer SSDs in 2008/2009 but OCZ lost a ton of sales once Samsung and other major OEMs began to take the consumer SSD market seriously. It's hard to say what ultimately killed OCZ without knowing their exact cost structure but I believe it was a combination of bad strategy (too many products and high production volumes) and engineering choices (low reliability) along with other things.

 

What happens to OCZ now depends on the completion of the Toshiba deal. Even if Toshiba completes the purchase of OCZ's assets, I doubt we'll see the OCZ brand anymore. OCZ's brand image took a hit with the low reliability, so I doubt Toshiba will see the OCZ brand adding any value to its products. I do hope that the deal goes through because OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 platform has a lot of potential and it would be lamentable to see all that hard work to be flushed down the toilet.

[Arthur]

Toshiba pays $35 million for assets of bankrupted OCZ « Ars Technica

 

Toshiba will be acquiring "OCZ's client and enterprise solid state drive business" and that the sale is expected to close "within approximately 60 days." Toshiba will also be providing OCZ with the funding it needs to buy up NAND and support "existing and future customers" during the transitional period.

 

The purchase nets Toshiba every single part of OCZ, most crucially its "proprietary controllers, firmware, and software, as well as the teams responsible for bringing those solutions to market." In other words, Toshiba will now own all of OCZ's tech and the people responsible for developing it, as well as OCZ's "established brand and sales channels."

 

OCZ CEO Ralph Schmidt blamed "credit issues" and NAND supply issues for the company's financial woes, as well as an increasingly competitive SSD market (other players include Samsung, Crucial, SanDisk, and Intel, and those are just a few of the biggest names). As technologies mature, it's common for smaller companies to merge with and acquire one another until just a few players are left standing—the same thing happened in the GPU industry in the late 90s and early 2000s, for example.

 

Toshiba already sells a number of SSD models to consumers and to OEMs. While the release states that OCZ's branding is part of the sale, it remains to be seen whether Toshiba will continue to develop and sell new OCZ-branded products in the future or if its technology will be sold under Toshiba's name. We've contacted an OCZ representative for comment and will update if we receive a response.

[Arthur]

OCZ warranty details for those of you who had the misfortune of buying their SSDs.

 

An Update Regarding OCZ's Warranties « AnandTech

 

In short, all OCZ's latest SSDs will be covered by warranty normally, but the unfortunate news is that all non-SSD products (such as PSUs, DRAM, USB drives etc.) will not be supported at all. Outstanding product warranties were excluded from the acquisition terms, so it appears that Toshiba is only willing to cover the most necessary products, those being OCZ's most popular SSDs. Bear in mind that the acquisition only included OCZ's consumer and enterprise storage divisions -- last time I heard OCZ was looking for a buyer for its other units but it seems that they've not been able to find one.

 

[mac_shinobi]

@nephilim ref ocz warranty