SanDisk Corporation (nasdaq: SNDK) is an American multinational corporation which designs and markets flash memory card products. SanDisk was founded in 1988 by Eli Harari and Sanjay Mehrotra, non-volatile memory technology experts. SanDisk became a publicly traded company on NASDAQ in November 1995. In January 2008 its market capitalization was US$6.5 billion. SanDisk produces many different types of flash memory, including various memory cards and a series of USB removable drives. SanDisk markets to both the high-end and low-end sector demand for premium quality flash memory; and markets to other equipment makers as well as direct to consumers.

The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California, with offices or manufacturing facilities in 10 locations in Asia (including Taiwan, China and Japan), 6 locations in Europe (including the UK, Ireland and Spain), and 3 locations in Israel (Kfar Sava, Tefen and Omer).

History

Eli Harari, an Israeli Engineer, began making early contributions to EEPROM - electrically erasable programmable read-only memory, a precursor to flash memory. Harari worked on flash memory at Intel, leaving to found a start-up which failed. In 1988, Harari launched the company that would become SanDisk with former Intel colleague Sanjay Mehrotra, and former Hughes Microelectronics colleague Jack Yuan.

Early on, Sandisk had recognized that digital cameras would need digital storage, and computers could become ever more mobile and light and would require a similar storage technology. In 1988 Harari offered the flash memory card technology to Kodak for inclusion in their cameras. Kodak offered to fund the development with the condition that SanDisk offer a three year exclusive contract for the 'digital film'. Harari and Sandisk rejected the offer, preferring to have competition in the marketplace.

Financial information

SanDisk is a component of the GSTI Semiconductor Index

Acquisitions

• SanDisk bought M-Systems, a USB flash memory stick maker for US$1.3 billion in 2006.

MP3 license dispute

On September 4 2006 at the IFA show in Berlin, German authorities seized all MP3 players that were in SanDisk's booth since Italian patent company Sisvel had won an injunction against it regarding the MP3 format. Sisvel, who had previously filed a separate lawsuit in Mannheim, claims that SanDisk uses the MP3 format without paying the required licensing fee. On September 8, 2006, a Berlin court overturned the injunction and SanDisk put the players back on display.

On March 16 2007 SanDisk issued a press release announcing they had reached agreement and now acquired licences for all current and future MP3 applications.

Products

FlashCP

FlashCP is a digital rights management technology for the storage of electronic materials (e.g. e-books) on portable devices. FlashCP is targeted primarily at students and allows transportation of copyrighted material while enforcing copy restrictions against the user. SanDisk acquired the technology in 2005 with the purchase of Israel-based MDRM. As an avid proponent of DRM, this is one of many such technologies developed by SanDisk, the other ones being Gruvi pre-loaded memory cards and the underlying TrustedFlash technology. SanDisk media players have near universal support for Windows Media DRM and rely almost exclusively on variants of the copy-protection capable Secure Digital format for removable storage.