Kingston Technology in big buy back bonanza

Four years ago, the founders of Kingston Technology sold 80 per cent of their business to Softbank, raking in a cool $1.8 billion in the process. When we met the founders at Comdex/Fall, they looked very happy indeed with this result. Perhaps they had an inkling that the very next year the memory market would take the dive it has. And now Softbank has decided to sell the 80 per cent share back to the founders for $450 million. So we expect that they're looking exceedingly happy again. Softbank's reasoning, according to the WSJ, is that it wants to concentrate on the lucrative Internet market. And according to the same report, it is now engaged in an attempt to sell off bits and pieces of the Ziff-Davis publishing empire to the highest bidder... ®