Seagate Technology on Tuesday dashed its chief executive’s comments made in an interview regarding the potential sale of the world’s largest chipmaker to an unnamed Chinese technology company. The firm indicated that the claim was a hypothetical, not a factual one.

“Just to be clear, Seagate has not received such an offer and we are not trying to sell the company,” Seagate said in a corporate statement provided to Reuters news-agency on Tuesday.

Apparently, William Watkins, Seagate’s chief ececutive, had actually referred to growing interest in hard disk drives technology from companies in China, Japan and Korea. However, Seagate insisted that it had never received a take over proposal from a technology company based in Asia.

Late last week The New York Times news-paper published an article containing comments made by Mr. Watkins about acquisition of Seagate by a large Chinese technology companies. The article titled “Chinese Seek to Buy a U.S. Maker of Disk Drives” firmly stated that a China-based company expressed interest in taking over Seagate.

While hard disk drives do not fall under a list of export-controlled technologies, the attempted purchase of an American disk drive company would require a security review by the federal government, the news-paper cites U.S. government representatives as saying. The U.S. officials warn about possibilities to transfer information from hard drives to third parties, including Chinese intelligent services.