Seagate and Toshiba are competing to buy TDK's hard-drive heads

Seagate and Toshiba are competing to buy TDK's hard-drive head business, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the talks. A purchase could be worth as much as several billion dollars. No agreement has been announced.

Toshiba opened the discussions this spring. Seagate submitted a higher offer this summer. The talks are early and could still fall apart.

Seagate and TDK declined to comment, and Toshiba did not immediately respond.

A head is the small part inside a hard drive that reads and writes the data on the spinning disk. In its integrated report, TDK says it is the world's only specialized manufacturer of those heads, and that three companies make them: TDK, Seagate, and Western Digital.

TDK's head business says its mission is "to remain the world's leading independent manufacturer in magnetic head storage." That means it sells heads to drive makers, rather than making them only for its own use.

In August, TDK put its share of the market at 15% to 20%, third in the industry.

Toshiba buys every head from TDK, people familiar with the talks said. Seagate and Western Digital make heads for their own drives and buy from TDK when demand rises. Western Digital, the other buyer, is not bidding.

Seagate's filings say it makes heads and also buys them, with the mix depending on its products, the technology, and how full its factories are.

Nikkei reported that Toshiba plans to double production capacity for hard drives used in AI data centers within fiscal 2027, from its 2025 level. Toshiba holds just over 10% of the market by storage capacity and wants 30% over the medium term, Nikkei said. Those drives need the heads Toshiba already buys from TDK.

On Friday, after that capacity report, Seagate and Western Digital each fell 10.2%. On Monday, Seagate rose 4.5% and Western Digital rose 6.3%.

Krish Sankar, an analyst at TD Cowen, said doubling capacity would still leave Toshiba with 15% to 17% of the market.

People familiar with the talks said executives from Seagate, Toshiba, and TDK met in Tokyo last week to discuss keeping heads supplied, including through a possible joint venture. They said both bidders want to keep buying from an independent supplier if they lose.

The same people said TDK is weighing the sale of a business that has swung with drive demand and needs steady spending to keep up with recording technology, while it puts more resources into batteries, passive components, and sensors.

In afternoon trading in Tokyo on Tuesday, TDK shares were up 6.0%. The head unit is one piece of a segment that also makes suspensions and magnets, with sales of 262.9 billion yen in the year ended March 2026, 10.5% of TDK's sales. Toshiba, private since December 2023, has no shares to trade.

Regulators have looked at this supply question before. In October 2011, the European Commission recorded that Toshiba bought all its heads from TDK, and weighed whether Seagate's purchase of Samsung's drive business could leave TDK without enough customers. It cleared the deal.

In December 2011, China's Ministry of Commerce barred Seagate from requiring TDK's China unit to supply heads only to Seagate, or from limiting what TDK could sell to other drive makers.

The Tokyo meeting was about keeping that supply open. If one bidder wins, the loser and Western Digital still need a way to buy the heads.