History (1992): Kalok to Sell Philippines HDD Facility to Xebec

Kalok Corp. (Sunnyvale, CA) has sold to Xebec Co., Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan) its Manila-based HDD drive manufacturing operation.

The purchase was stated to be valued at over $3 milllon and no other financial details were disclosed.

Xebec is a manufacturer of PCBs and related electronic assemblies and has been a primary supplier to Kalok.

The agreement, effective since October 1, 1991, calls for Xebec to exclusively provide all of Kalok’s HDD drive manufacturing on a turnkey basis.

Xebec’s president, Shtiji Ohnita, said: “Acquiring Kalok’s disk drive manufacturing facility is a natural extension of our current business strategy. By using the high-quality, volume-manufacturing expertise, combined with becoming vertically integrated through providing our own PCBs, we expect to enhance Kalok’s position in the market place as a supplier of low-cost, high performance disk drives.”

Tom Makmann, Kalok’s president, stated: “It offers Kalok a true turnkey supplier for its current and future KL3000 series product lines. Xebec’s past performance has shown their ability to manufacture products of consistent quality at the lowest possible cost. Additionally, this will allow Kalok to continue its focus on new-product development and bring state-of-the-art devices to market.”

The disk drive manufacturing facility, located in Manila, Republic of the Philippines, was established in 1989 and has a rated capacity of 50,000 drives per month. Originally designed to Kalok’s specs, it contains 4 parallel manufacturing lines, a class 100 cleanroom, and associated inventory storage and testing areas.

The facility supplies Kalok’s KL3000 series drive families, including the 105MB, KL3100 model and the new 120MB KL3120 drive announced at Comdex/Fall’91.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠48, published on January 1992.

Note: Kalok bankrupts in 1994