Sandisk rejects Samsung sale offer

Samsung’s offer to acquire a flash memory manufacturer SanDisk for $US5.85 billion (£3.2 billion) in cash has been rejected.

SanDisk owns patents that Samsung pays $440 million a year to licence. The handset manufacturer offered to pay $26 a share for SanDisk but the company refused the bid because the offer “didn’t reflect the intrinsic value of SanDisk’s business.”

“A combined Samsung-SanDisk would have a superior global brand, an unparalleled technology platform and the scale and resources to drive convergence in the marketplace,” said Samsung vice chairman and chief executive Yoon-Woo Lee.

SanDisk founder and chief executive Mr Eli Harari said: “We believe Samsung’s proposal does not provide appropriate value to our stockholders and is opportunistically timed at the trough of an industrywide downturn.”

William D. Watkins, Seagate’s chief executive, a former investor in SanDisk said of the deal: “Harari is a friend but Seagate can’t come in and save SanDisk.”