Computer Memory

Acer is one of the largest producers of computer hardware in the world in the modern day and is a multinational company with its HQ located in New Taipei City, Taiwan.

However, as is the case with many companies, it had quite humble beginnings. It began in 1976 with an investment of just $25,000 of capital and the company (then known as Multitech) was founded in Hsinchu City by Stan Shih, his wife Carolyn Yeh and five other investors. To begin with, the enterprise was concerned primarily with the distribution of electronic parts and would go on to be a big part of the emerging IBM PC market. 

By 1987, the company had become a major player in PC manufacturing and it was at this point that it became known as brand Acer.

By the end of the 1990s, Acer had reorganised itself into 5 subsidiaries:

Acer International Service Group
Acer Sertek Group
Acer Semiconductor Group
Acer Information Products Group
Acer Peripherals Group
 
In the year 2000, another restructuring occurred, as Acer extricated itself from the contract manufacturing side of the business, which then had two primary parts - Wistron Corporation and BenQ, which it then sold to concentrate all of its time and resources on designing and selling computers.

This is the point where the company began to resemble the one we know today, as it began to significantly increase its worldwide sales. By 2005, despite employing just 7,800 people globally (which is not a lot for a major producer of computers), it was turning over more than $11 billion annually.

Notebook Success
One of the major drivers for Acer’s success during this period was its production of consumer notebooks and as we mentioned earlier, the company’s overheads were relatively low, which meant they enjoyed more success than most in this field.

Acer products are used across the world, but it is in Europe that is holds the largest of its market share and it tried to buck the trend of online retail sales in favour of more traditional retail distribution channels.

Acquisitions
In 2007, Packard Bell and US company Gateway were acquired by Acer, which led to the company becoming the third largest provider of computers in the world and the second largest for notebooks. Acer’s ultimate goal is to become the largest PC vendor on the planet and it is one that they are confident in pulling off, with the European computer market continuing to prove a good hunting ground for the multinational.

SanDisk is a name ubiquitous in the world of technology, which began its life back in 1988 when Eli Harari, Jack Yuan and Sanjay Mehrotra got together to form the company, with its Headquarters in California. This trio were responsible for developing ‘Floating Gate’ technology called EEPROM, which represented something of a breakthrough in semiconductor hardware.

12 years after its inception the company was joined by the Toshiba Corporation in researching new types of semiconductor for the digital camera market.

The Mobile Phone Boom
Around 2003 to 2004, the mobile phone industry was going through a major boom time and Sandisk were a major part of the expansion. As the capabilities of mobile devices increased, their need for expanded memory became ever greater. From memory cards able to store just a few hundred megabytes at the beginning, the technology advanced to such a degree that in a few short years, they were able to cram in 10s or even 100s of Gigabytes into the same space.

Acquisitions
Over the next few years, Sandisk made a number of acquisitions which strengthened their hand in the semiconductor market. From 2005 to 2014, the company acquired:

• Matrix Semiconductor
• M-Systems
• Pilant Technology (a manufacturer of SSD technology)
• FlashSoft
• Schooner Information Technology (Developer of Membrain and SchoonerSQL)
• SMART Storage Systems (SSD manufacturers for the enterprise market)
• Fusion-io (producers of flash memory used in Enterprise level data centres)

These acquisitions were made at considerable cost to Sandisk, with the total amount in the region of $5bn, but it placed the company well in the market to make even greater strides in the global permanent and flash storage markets.

Since 2014, Sandisk continued to innovate and launched a number of technological firsts, like the Ultra microSDXC memory card, with a staggering 128 Gigabytes of storage contained within. Around the same time, the company launched the Extreme PRO SDXC, which was the highest capacity SD memory card in existence.

Western Digital Acquisition
Fast forward to 2016 and just a few months after Sandisk launched its ‘InfiniFlash’ technology (an entire new category of ‘all-flash’ storage system) and it entered the high end SSD market, the company was bought out by Western Digital, one of the largest HDD manufacturers in the world for a massive $19bn. 

Since 2005, Sandisk is said to have sold over 2 Billion microSD memory cards around the world, illustrating just how large scale its operation is. The company still operates in the same way under the umbrella of Western Digital, who supports in the subsidiary’s efforts to continue to this day, to innovate in the field of memory hardware.