Samsung Electronics wants to buy SanDisk , in a USD $3 billion move that thwarts No. 2 player Toshiba. 
SanDisk owns 1550+ patents (with 1440+ patents pending) and is the only company, worldwide, with rights to both make and sell every major flash card format. Samsung already pays them $450 million a year in royalties.
Price drops in the $15 billion global memory market forced SanDisk into its first quarterly loss in 7 years ago.
This comes as SanDisk sets a new speed record of 30MB per second for SD™ flash memory cards with SanDisk Extreme III. Available WW in 4-8-16 GBs, the new cards deliver peak performance in the DSLR camera, Nikon D90.