History (1995): French Electronique D2 to Buy LaCie, Subsidiary of Quantum

Quantum (Milpitas, CA) has signed a memo of understanding to sell 100% of its wholly-owned subsidiary LaCie Limited (Beaverton, OR) to Electronique D2 (Massy, France).

No price was revealed. The operation should be completed by mid-September.

“This sale will position D2 as the largest supplier of Macintosh aftermarket storage product in the world,” said Ken Pelowski, Quantum’s VP of strategic planning and business development.

In the midst of Quantum, which acquired the company in 1991 for $3.8 million and made it a subsidiary of Plus Development, LaCie was an oddity. Plus was merged with Quantum distribution in the same year and La Cie then became a direct subsidiary of Quantum.

Founded in 1987, LaCie is primarily a distributor of storage peripherals (80% of its sales), in addition to scanners (10%) and others (10%), via resellers (25% of its sales) or directly to users (75%) for Macintosh computers.

Its largest market is in USA. For its last fiscal year, LaCie recorded sales of $30 million, 17% of which came from exports through distribution agreements in Japan, Australia and Taiwan. The company employs 50 people in the US.

Taking a closer look, LaCie was thus in competition with some of Quantum’s clients, who didn’t always appreciate it. To a certain extent, the company was even in competition with Quantum itself, given the presence of other manufacturer’s HDDs in its catalog, Seagate, for example.

The Oregon company had a unique and exclusive licensing agreement with Apple to manufacture and distribute external HDDs bearing the Apple logo.

Recently, LaCie finalized an original product, the Joule modular storage subsystem, consisting of a base module to which many SCSI drives in 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch form factors (HDDs, SyQuest, QIC, DAT or optical drives) can be connected one on top of the other.

By selling LaCie just as last year, it sold its PassPort XL family of 3.5-inch removable HDDs to Lockheed’s Mountain Gate Data Systems, Quantum now returns to its only activity: the manufacturing and sale of HDD and DLT drives. And it washes its hands of a small, not very profitable activity.

For the privately-held D2 (which means Disk Drive in English and Disque Dur in French), this acquisition is a windfall. The company has been searching for a long time to set up in USA, after being installed through direct subsidiaries in 8 European countries.

“We have audited 4 or 5 American companies, including Mass Micro and PLI,” said Bruno Petit, marketing director at D2.

1993 even saw the company take a booth at Comdex Fall ’93 to find distributors for an SCSI card with a parallel port, but there was never any follow-up on this operation.

The 120-person company was founded in 1989 by its current president Philippe Spruch and Pierre Fournier, and has a turnover of $80 million. It specializes in storage peripherals for microcomputers, especially Macintosh, in SCSI environment.

D2 is one of the biggest European customers of Quantum’s and SyQuest’s drives, but also buys drives from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Seagate, etc.

According to Petit, the agreement does not include any special obligation to work exclusively with Quantum.

In April 1994, the company’s capital was up to $4 million, 10% of which was given over to the French venture capital 3L. This is not the first time a French firm in the world of Macintosh peripherals has sought to set up shop in the US. The Chess group, belonging to the Frouin brothers (today executives at Nomaï), which had a subsidiary, Top of the Mac, tried its luck in the US through the acquisition of Californian company Jasmine in external HDDs in 1990. This buy out led the group into bankruptcy, as the Frouin brothers realized only once it was too late what Jasmine was all about: it had lost its image and was heavily in debt to its San Francisco landlord. D2 has probably learned from this lesson.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 91, published on August 1995.

Note: Seagate acquired LaCie in 2012 for $186 million.