Will SanDisk be sold to or merged with another company in 2008?

Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- SanDisk Corp., the world's largest maker of memory cards used in digital cameras, surged the most in eight years in New York trading after Samsung Electronics Co. made a $5.85 billion hostile bid for the company. Samsung, the world's second-largest chipmaker, offered $26 in cash for each SanDisk share, 73 percent more than the memory- card maker's closing price in the U.S. yesterday. SanDisk rejected the offer.

A purchase would give Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung semiconductor patents held by SanDisk and help widen its lead over Toshiba Corp. in the $15 billion market for flash-memory chips that store songs and pictures in consumer electronics. The unsolicited offer signals Samsung's increased appetite for acquisitions after Lee Yoon Woo became chief executive officer in May. ``This aggressiveness is definitely a departure from the Samsung of the past decade,'' said Kim Hyun Wook, a fund manager at KB Asset Management Co. in Seoul, which has the equivalent of $2.6 billion in equities. ``Toshiba probably doesn't have the spare money to challenge Samsung to a bidding war.'' SanDisk, based in Milpitas, California, jumped $5.88, or 39 percent, to $20.92 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading, the biggest advance since January 2000. Samsung closed unchanged at 525,000 won on the Korea Exchange, and is down 5.6 percent this year.

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