Toshiba and US partner Western Digital will commit 1.5 trillion yen or US$14.6 billion over three years toward stepping up flash memory production at their jointly run Japanese plant, in a bid to widen global market share, Nikkei reported.

SanDisk has announced that the Ministry of Commerce of China has approved the acquisition of SanDisk by Western Digital.

The transaction is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2016.

The two companies could reach a deal as soon as this week.

Micron Technology and Western Digital are in talks with SanDisk about a possible acquisition, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is private.

Tsinghua Unigroup, the state-backed Chinese firm that recently agreed to buy a stake in Western Digital, is close to acquiring local chip company Tongfang Guoxin Electronics, a person familiar with the matter said.

Western Digital and Unisplendour have entered into an agreement under which a subsidiary of Unis will make a US$3.775 billion equity investment in Western Digital.

Chinese interest in Synaptics and Western Digital shows Beijing is accelerating efforts to buy the building blocks for a domestic technology industry.

Seagate alleged that Western Digital and a former Seagate employee misappropriated confidential information and trade secrets.

Western Digital again shipped more disk drives than Seagate in the fourth quarter of 2010, although Seagate's stronger enterprise presence allowed it to top WD in overall revenues.

Western Digital has sought to reassure investors about the slowing hard-drive business, as the advent of tablet computers eats into computer demand.

The group aims to end a long and heated debate about the next big leap in disk technology and is expected eventually to include all drive makers and their component vendors.

Hard disk drive maker Western Digital has posted a sharp increase in its fiscal second-quarter profit as sales grew amid a recovery in the technology sector and the company trimmed costs.

The formal transfer of Fujitsu's hard disk drive business to Toshiba has been postponed to Oct. 1 pending approval from Chinese antitrust authorities, a person familiar with the proceedings told Dow Jones Newswires.

Western Digital has announced that it has completed a US$65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Aliso Viejo, California, a supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Shares of Seagate Technology tumbled to a 52-week low Thursday after the hard-drive maker posted disappointing second-quarter results and gave a third-quarter outlook below Wall Street's expectations.