Seagate promotes longtime company veteran to CFO
Seagate is making a bit of a leadership shuffle in the business department.
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The data storage solutions maker is promoting company veteran David H. Morton, Jr. to the role of chief financial officer, replacing current CFO Patrick O'Malley.
Morton has been at Seagate since 1995, most recently serving as the Silicon Valley company's senior vice president, treasurer and principal accounting officer.
Over the last 20 years, Morton performed multiple roles at the hardware company in both the United States and Asia with global organization responsibilities spanning accounting, pricing and sales operations.
Serving as CFO since 2008, O'Malley has been with Seagate since 1988. But O'Malley isn't going far as he plans to remain with Seagate as an executive vice president, primarily overseeing strategic and operational initiatives.
Both executives will report to Seagate CEO Steve Luczo.
A reason for the shuffle wasn't provided, but Luczo elaborated on Morton's experience in a press release, noting he recently "successfully managed the operational aspects of our finance organization, including leading our cash management and corporate finance activities."
With a new CFO in line, Seagate published a bit of financial business news as well, bumping up its annual dividend by 17 percent from $2.16 to $2.52 per share.
Luczo explained in a separate statement that the increase demonstrates Seagate's sustainable balance sheet.
Seagate isn't the only storage player making moves on Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, rival Western Digital announced plans to buy SanDisk for $19 billion in the the largest consolidation in the storage market to date.
SanDisk was the third largest flash memory manufacturer, trailing Samsung and Toshiba.
2015 has seen a number of consolidations in this space, including NXP and Freescale merging in a $40 billion deal in March; Avago buying up Broadcom for $37 billion in May, and then Intel bought Altera for $16.7 billion in June.