NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Dell Inc. has enjoyed the luxury of not needing to post it’s financial results for almost two-and-a-half years following its decision to take itself private again, but with the company firmly setting its sights on an EMC Corp. gobble, its been forced to open its accounting books up for scrutiny once again.
And those numbers don’t look so good.
Dell shed light on its financial performance over the last year in a Form S-4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this week. The Form S-4 is for the benefit of EMC’s shareholders, who’ll finally get to vote on whether to accept Dell’s $67 billion takeover offer in the coming weeks.
Dell’s numbers, which were dug out of the hideously long, 341-page document by The Register, show that sales for the year ended 31 January 2016 were down across the majority of its businesses. Even worse, the figures show the company is still heavily reliant on flogging PCs for the bulk of its revenues, even as that market seems locked in terminal decline. Dell’s client devices business accounted for $35.8 billion of its total $54.88 billion revenues for the year, but were down nine percent year-on-year.
Things don’t look all that bright for Dell’s other businesses either. Dell’s Software Group saw revenues of just $1.36 billion, down nine percent, though the company blamed the realignment of its sales organization for that. But Dell’s Services division also lost cash, with revenues falling by five percent to $2.84 billion.
The only real bright spot for Dell is its Enterprise Group, which saw revenues increase by two percent to $14.97 billion; servers and networking accounted for the bulk of those revenues, pulling in $12.76 billion, a three percent increase from one year ago; storage revenues meanwhile, declined by five percent to $2.217 billion.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom at Dell just yet. The Register correctly points out that Michael Dell the CEO almost certainly has a plan to return the company to growth once the EMC acquisition is done and dusted. He has to, because Dell will borrow billions of dollars in order to finance the deal, and those declining PC revenues are unlikely to be enough to pay it off.
Dell admitted as much in its filing, saying that the plan is to sell off unnamed “non-core assets”, which are likely to include Perot Systems, Quest Software and Sonicwall, among others.
The Register speculates that Dell’s long-term plan may be to go public again once the hugely complex task of integrating its businesses with EMC’s is complete.
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