Unisplendour Corp. (Unis) of China's Tsinghua University formed a joint venture with Western Digital Corp. (WDC) on Thursday, hoping that new alliance can expand the American company's market share in China while facilitating technological advancement in the Chinese university-based enterprise.
The JV, Unis WDC Storage Co., involves a 51-49 percent share allocation. The new company will be based in Nanjing, while maintaining a sales and marketing office in Beijing. Unis WDC's line of products includes WDC's data storage systems such as HGST Active Archive System, according to the company's statement.
Unis WDC will provide big data storage solutions to a range of industries in China, including financial services, media, astronomy and meteorology, telecommunications and genetic science forming an industry coverage 'from chip to cloud,'" said CEO Miao Gang at the JV's launch ceremony.
"Unis WDC aims to become the leader in comprehensive, secure and controllable core big data storage technologies. We will practice the 'ingenious R&D concept, focusing on data reliability and maximizing data security for our customers," Miao said.
WDC also expressed high hopes for the alliance. CEO Steve Milligan said partnerships with such growth-oriented companies as Unisplendour were important for its expansion of high-growth market in China.
WDC acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in March 2002 and SanDisk Corp last May to establish itself as the world's largest company both for hard disk drive and storage solutions.
The Unis and WDC alliance is yet another technology-for-market agreement between a Chinese company and a leading international player. Unis had already established a JV with HP for server products last year. Lenovo bought out IBM's line of X86 servers in 2014, nine years after taking over its global PC supplier in 2005.
Insiders said such alliances were also meant to bypass the Chinese governments' requirements for information security that calls for more home-made products in strategic sectors such as government agencies, finance, science, and media, especially in the wake of the Edward Snowden incident in 2013. Snowden leaked massive amounts of information from the U.S. National Security Agency.
IT products-based JVs such as Unis WDC will be labelled as Chinese, thus meeting the tight requirement for government procurements. As for those who still fancy an original name brand, such JVs can deliver OEM products accordingly labeled.
