Bad headline: WD acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
The Hitachi company itself is a monster that makes WD look like a mom & pop operation. What you see as a consumer is dwarfed by its industrial products and much, much more.
There's something about these large Japanese conglomerates that just don't seem to have any parallel in the US. GE might be the closest thing, but even though it's a larger company it doesn't seem to have the finger-in-every-pie feel that these Asian conglomerates do (e.g., Hyundai, Fuji, Mitsubishi, ...)
The US definitely has parallels. You can take almost any brand, and trace it back to a handful of large corporations. The Japanese are just more open about it, whereas US companies have subsidiaries that falsely suggest competition.
In the past few years, they had the lowest failure rate, by a large margin, on professional grade drives. I say that having set up and sold many thousands hard drives since 2003.
1) Employees are not a metric of a company's value. It's like measuring a program's value by lines of code.
2) The comparison is completely irrelevant:
a) Facebook is a software-only internet startup that has the serious potential of eventually being the biggest web company ever.
b) Hitachi is a mature hardware company and manufacturer dealing in a market with rather slim margins and serious credible competition (well, now it's just the two companies with decent spinning-disk-drives.)
That's really not any more appropriate a comparison than comparing Facebook to, say, Toyota.
You make a few valid points, however I think scrrr's reaction is justified as well.
a) Facebook is a software-only internet startup that has the serious potential of eventually being the biggest web company ever.
Ignoring the hyperbole for a moment I'd argue that there's still a gap between "has the potential" and "is today". According to wikipedia Hitachi is the third largest technological company by revenue as of 2009. Hitachi does state as profit about the same amount that facebook states as revenue.
Hitachi has also been around 94 years longer than facebook. That suggests there's probably not too much untapped potential remaining. But it also suggests that Hitachi is less likely to suddenly disappear overnight only because some teenager accidentally created a "hitachi-killer" in his basement...
Note for those confused by this conversation, the original headline implied that WD acquired all of Hitachi for $4.3 billion. Hitachi had revenue of $96 billion in 2010, so that would have been a pretty sweet deal. :)
The business calculus is a bit strange here. WD and Hitachi are in the part of the storage market that has to be pretty close to it's peak. The HDD business seems to have grown in 2010 http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4213390/Western-Digi... but it's pretty doubtful that the trend will continue, and it seems like there's a pretty sharp cliff coming.
That in mind, why pay $4.3B for a company that only has 2-5 years left in a dying, $0.6B industry that has low profit margins?
Calendar 2010 was a year of tremendous opportunity for the hard drive industry with 651 million drives shipped. That's 330 million terabytes of storage capacity sold into a broadening set of applications and markets. At 16%, this was the industry's strongest full year unit growth in five years. Rotating magnetic storage remains the dominant technology solution for high-volume mass storage of digital content in both the consumer and commercial markets. Full year revenue for the industry expanded by some 13% to $34 billion.
This isn't just about hard drives. Hitachi Storage also makes some pretty huge -- and well-regarded -- SANs, and enterprise storage is one area into which I've never really seen WD make much headway. This acquisition would make them a full-spectrum player in the storage market.
Enterprise storage is also an area with rather higher profit margins than merely hawking spinning rust.
The Hitachi company itself is a monster that makes WD look like a mom & pop operation. What you see as a consumer is dwarfed by its industrial products and much, much more.