Sandisk to Buy Pliant Technology for $327 Million; Market rewards SNDK with Upside

“Sandisk

this morning saidit agreed to buy Pliant Technology, a developer of enterprise solid state drives, for $327 million in cash plus certain equity-based incentives. The deal is expected to close by the end of the second quarter.

The company said Pliant is a leader in the use of multi-level cell – MLC – NAND in enterprise SSDs.

“Flash memory is making significant inroads into the enterprise by dramatically increasing application performance and reducing power consumption,” SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement. “We believe that the combination of Pliant’s innovative technology and enterprise-level system expertise with SanDisk’s high-quality, large-scale MLC memory production is a winning value proposition for customers.”

SanDisk expects the deal to be dilutive to its non-GAAP earnings by 2% to 3% in fiscal year 2011 and accretive to non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2012.

Investors in Milpitas, California-based Pliant include Arcturas Capital, Divergent Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures.

SNDK this morning is up $1.77, or 3.8%, to $48.26.”

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