Kioxia Chief Executive Yusuke Ota has ruled out deeper cooperation with SK Hynix and said the run-up in NAND prices has gone far enough, according to Bloomberg’s Sept. 9 report.
NAND price gains have reached their limit
Bloomberg, as cited in the report, said Ota only took over as CEO in April this year. He said he has told Kioxia’s sales teams not to seek large additional price increases in negotiations with data center customers because even hyperscale operators have limited budgets.
That view stands against Kioxia’s own recent pricing record. In the quarter ending in June, the company’s NAND product prices rose 70% from the previous quarter. Ota’s position was blunt: prices have already risen enough, and pushing them higher would hurt the broader market.
He did not name Apple, but the report said Apple is Kioxia’s largest single customer and accounts for about one-fifth of the company’s revenue.
Ota rejects merger or formal alliance talk with SK Hynix
The report also addressed market discussion around a closer Kioxia-SK Hynix relationship. Ota responded by saying, 「We have absolutely no idea what prompted him to say that」, referring to SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won.
ABMedia noted that ChainNews had previously reported Chey as saying that if Kioxia failed to include SK Hynix in its future strategy, investment would be terminated. Ota’s latest remarks directly pushed back on that path.
When explaining why Kioxia is not considering a formal alliance, Ota gave two reasons: the threshold for antitrust review and Kioxia’s existing joint production arrangement with SanDisk.
Filings show Bain-related vehicle is the top shareholder
The company’s shareholder structure was also clarified in the report. According to Kioxia’s major shareholder change filing released on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Aug. 10, BCPE Pangea Cayman2, Ltd. became the largest shareholder on Aug. 3, holding 77,400,000 shares and 14.19% of voting rights. Its representative is John Connaughton.
Toshiba, the previous top shareholder, moved to second place with 77,038,200 shares and a 14.12% stake.
The report said BCPE Pangea Cayman is an affiliate of U.S. private equity firm Bain Capital and the core entity in Kioxia’s largest shareholder group. Its origins trace back to the 2017-2018 carve-out of Toshiba’s memory business. The filing states that the entity is registered in the Cayman Islands, that its business is to hold shares for investment purposes, and that John Connaughton serves as chairman of Bain Capital.
Based on those filings, Kioxia’s largest shareholder is a Bain Capital investment vehicle, not SK Hynix. Bloomberg described SK Hynix as both a competitor and an interested party in relation to Kioxia, but did not refer to it as the company’s largest shareholder.