Fujitsu closes HDD head business

Fujitsu announced on Wednesday that it was getting out of the hard disk drive (HDD) head business and handing it over to Toshiba. The "head" on a disk drive is the part that flies across the surface of the disk "reading" or "writing" the data on the disk.

In a statement, Fujitsu said that it was discontinuing the HDD head business at the end of March.

“The HDD head development and manufacturing operations are currently performed at the Nagano Plant. The company will reassign plant employees working in the HDD head operations to other operations within the Fujitsu Group,” the statement said, making it clear that this is the end of the business and they are not thinking of starting it up again soon.

Other parts of the plant working on circuit boards for servers and in telecomms will continue, the company said.

The closure is not likely to be the last in the HDD business as companies re-organise themselves in the face of a tough market.