Business

New bidder for Seagate emerges

There is another bidder waiting in the wings to acquire Seagate Technology despite concerns that buyout firms are losing interest in the company, The Post has learned.

A rival strategic buyer remains interested in acquiring Seagate even as private-equity firm TPG Capital has trouble lining up financing for a bid, according to a source close to the situation.

“The race is not over yet,” the source said.

Seagate’s shares fell 4 percent yesterday to $14.34 on a Reuters report that private-equity firm Bain Capital had lost interest in teaming with TPG to buy the world’s largest maker of computer hard drives.

Seagate, which announced Oct. 14 that it was evaluating alternatives, has not set a final bidding deadline, said the source, adding that the strategic buyer is still working on its bid and will likely take a couple more weeks.

Meanwhile, TPG, which has been in talks to buy Seagate for months, is having difficulty keeping its investor group together to make a final offer, another source said.

A deal for Seagate, with a $6.8 billion market cap, would rank as the biggest leveraged buyout of the year.

TPG late last week was looking for extra equity, while its lenders have become nervous about Seagate’s earnings projections, the source said.

TPG declined comment and Seagate did not return calls.

Seagate, arguably, is set for a fall with technology moving away from disk drives and towards flash drives.

Toshiba is considered a logical strategic buyer after reaching a roughly $500 million agreement in 2009 to buy Fujitsu’s hard disk drive business.

Samsung is also in the hard drive business and has the money to make an acquisition, although one source said Samsung has recently shown an interest in growing its semiconductor business, instead of what is viewed as the commodity disk drive space.

Western Digital Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. are also top disk drive makers that could become the biggest and save costs by buying Seagate.