History (1996): Hyundai Forms MaxMedia in San Jose, CA

Hyundai Electronics America or HEA (Milpitas, CA) is forming a new division, MaxMedia (San Jose, CA), to develop and manufacture media for use in hard disk drives from its wholly-owned subsidiary Maxtor.

The captive media operation has hired Nicola Pignati, 46, as SVP and GM. His most recent position was VP, mobile products operations, at Seagate. Ian Sanders, 44, who was VP of media development at Seagate, is now SVP of technology at MaxMedia.

The new division expects to employ up to 500 people in San Jose, CA, and to begin production towards the middle 1997, with further overseas capacity planned for the future.

“When Hyundai acquired Maxtor, it was the only disk drive company without its own captive component manufacturing facility,” said Y.H. Kim, president of HEA. “We decided to form MaxMedia to assure Maxtor’s ability to meet disk drive production demand.”

Numerous rumors circulated concerning Hyundai’s acquisition of a disk media manufacturer, but in the end the firm preferred to set up its own plant from scratch.

Shortly before this, Maxtor announced a new advanced technology development group of 50 engineers in San Jose that will focus on heads/media integration, channel design and tribology. It will augment Maxtor’s prime hard disk drive development site in Longmont, CO.

“Our new San Jose advanced technology lab allow us to capitalize on the availability of experienced talent in Silicon Valley,” said Richard Balanson, Maxtor’s CTO.

The new Californian lab will be headed by Pantelis Alexopoulos, 47, previously executive director, advanced concepts, at Seagate.

In the meantime, none of this has prevented Maxtor from signing a new 5-year agreement to get thin-film disks from HMT Technology (Fremont, CA).

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 101, published on June 1996.