Business

The acceleration of Dell Technologies’ emerging growth opportunities is one of the companies’ main strategic goals for the current fiscal year that started Feb. 4, according to CFO Tom Sweet. “We want to push and move faster in these emerging growth opportunities,” he said during an investor meeting in New York April 5. “That’s why you hear investment dollars going into converged” and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, he said, adding: “That’s why you see us investing in gaming, high-end notebooks, service providers, consumer and small business, where we’re growing from five countries to 12 countries.”

The four other “themes” that the company is focused on for this fiscal year are the strengthening of its position as its customers’ “essential” infrastructure provider, growing at a premium in comparison to the rest of the market, winning in the hybrid and multi-cloud sectors, and driving synergies and integration, he said. “Those are the areas we’re focused on [and] we feel pretty good about where we are at this stage,” he said.

“Obviously we need to win in the hybrid and multi-cloud environment” because “that is the compute model of the future,” he said, adding: “It’s no longer about are you going to be in the cloud. It’s all about how many clouds are you going to manage? So, everybody’s going to be in a multi-cloud environment. The question is how you manage” all of the workloads “effectively and efficiently.”

The company believes it’s “set ourselves up to be the largest and fastest-growing provider of hybrid cloud services in the industry,” David Goulden, president of its Infrastructure Solutions Group, said later at the meeting.

In 2016, Dell Technologies achieved number one unit market share status in servers for the first time, Goulden also said. During the fourth quarter, it gained 200 basis points of revenue share in mainstream servers and gained 600 basis points of revenue share against its nearest rival in that space, he said. It’s also the market leader in rack scale servers, and that’s “where the growth is in the server marketplace,” he said.

The company recently reported that fourth-quarter revenue grew to $20.1 billion from $12.7 billion, but its loss for the quarter widened to $236 million from $155 million. (https://www.mesaonline.org/2017/03/30/dell-technologies-helped-market-share-gains-fourth-quarter/)

Challenges that the company faced in the fourth quarter included tough competition and increased component costs, Sweet said during a Q&A at the investor meeting. But he said: “The market’s always competitive.” The company saw component cost increases coming, but had already “locked in pricing” for certain products ahead of the holiday season, he said. Solid state drives have become “much more expensive” and are in short supply now, while the price of glass has also increased, he noted.