Dell to buy EMC for $67 billion in largest-ever tech merger
Two years after regaining control of his eponymous PC maker, Michael Dell on Monday announced plans to acquire enterprise giant EMC and combine the two firms in a $67 billion deal that will create the largest privately-owned technology company in the world.

The deal will be financed by Dell himself, MSD Partners --?his personal investment firm --?and private equity group Silver Lake, which also contributed capital toward Dell Inc.'s 2013 privatization. EMC's Board of Directors has already approved the merger, in which EMC shareholders will receive compensation totaling approximately $33.15 per EMC share.
That figure includes tracking stock tied to VMWare, a major player in the burgeoning virtualization market and a publicly-traded company controlled by EMC. VMWare will remain independent following completion of the merger.
"The combination of Dell and EMC creates an enterprise solutions powerhouse bringing our customers industry leading innovation across their entire technology environment," Michael Dell said in a release. "Our new company will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security.
EMC is already a significant presence in the enterprise, both with its own storage systems and services and through subsidiaries that include Pivotal Software and RSA Security. The company competes with IBM in a number of areas, and the tie-up will likely put Dell in direct competition with the Apple-IBM alliance for some enterprise contracts.

The deal will be financed by Dell himself, MSD Partners --?his personal investment firm --?and private equity group Silver Lake, which also contributed capital toward Dell Inc.'s 2013 privatization. EMC's Board of Directors has already approved the merger, in which EMC shareholders will receive compensation totaling approximately $33.15 per EMC share.
That figure includes tracking stock tied to VMWare, a major player in the burgeoning virtualization market and a publicly-traded company controlled by EMC. VMWare will remain independent following completion of the merger.
"The combination of Dell and EMC creates an enterprise solutions powerhouse bringing our customers industry leading innovation across their entire technology environment," Michael Dell said in a release. "Our new company will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security.
EMC is already a significant presence in the enterprise, both with its own storage systems and services and through subsidiaries that include Pivotal Software and RSA Security. The company competes with IBM in a number of areas, and the tie-up will likely put Dell in direct competition with the Apple-IBM alliance for some enterprise contracts.
Comments
We'll see.
I predict 2 + 2 = 3.
It's bad enough that Dell now resells the Surface Pro to enterprise clients, same with HP.
Dell basically saying the PC is dead, long live enterprise storage. Good luck trying to save the PC with your Surface Book, Microsoft.
So does this deal benefit or hurt MS? I thought Dell was a MS vendor but also had Linux products. I don't know if EMC's enterprise solution uses MS or not.
Intel reports tomorrow. IDC/Gartner guesses predict a pretty bad quarter for PC sales. It will be interesting to see what Intel reports. It's funny how when Satya Nadella took over at Microsoft he got rid of the whole "devices & services" mantra yet he seems to be doubling down on that. Perhaps Surface Book was in the pipeline before he took over but he could have killed it if he wanted. My guess is Microsoft knows companies like Dell and HP are moving more into enterprise services and they don't care about the smaller players like Acer and Asus (according to re/code the Asus chairman was none too pleased that Microsoft announced a laptop).
Microsoft is basically saying we want to own the premium segment. Companies like Dell, HP and Lenovo can just focus on enterprise sales. What's left is the low margin cheap consumer segment and I don't see many companies surviving on that. My guess is companies like Asus and Acer won't be around much longer or will get snatched up by someone else.
Another indication that 'old tech' is consolidating in response to the Cloud. All of these businesses (Servers, Storage, PC's, and Networking) are in decline as the emergence of competitors such as Amazon, MS Azure, and the likes of Salesforce.com (SaaS) are on the ascendancy.
Dell has been trying to diversify into Software and 'hyper-converged' infrastructure with little success against the likes of Cisco UCS. I predict that Cisco will acquire NetApp as they have/had a significant relationship with EMC.
As to how this will ultimately work out for the combined Dell-EMC, I am generally a pessimist against these types of mergers...
Talk about stretching the facts to fit a narrative.
So does this deal benefit or hurt MS? I thought Dell was a MS vendor but also had Linux products. I don't know if EMC's enterprise solution uses MS or not.
It doesn't hurt MS, since EMC uses windows as virtual machines as well. EMC being a software company largely depended on PC/servers from vendors like Dell and HP, so this makes absolutely good sense to combine the force. It should remain the same beneficially with dell and ms relationship.
It's bad enough that Dell now resells the Surface Pro to enterprise clients, same with HP.
I don't see how it's bad for Dell to sell Surface Pro. I'm sure they get a good deal from MS and wont have to worry about making a tablet and focus on their PCs and server products. And now buying EMC they should be able to focus even more on the hardware/software infrastructure sitting in the massive data centers all over the world.
So basically what you're saying is Tim Cook's Apple is more concerned about Wall Street than delivering the best products and services for customers. Isn't that a bad omen for the company then? There's no way the company will ever go private.
Do tell how a company with a market cap of over $600B goes private.
Being private or public has no bearing on your market cap. There is no artificial formula that says "you can do it your valuation is $599 billion, but at $600 billion, it's not permitted." Dell did it at s $13.65 per share which equates to a $24.4 billion valuation. PLEASE DON"T MAKE A COMMENT ABOUT APPLE'S SHARE PRICE BEING $100 MORE THAN DELL!
If going private was a panacea wouldn't more companies be doing it?
Now you're changing your argument, as well as trying to imply that I think it's a good move for Apple.
PS: You can easily google the pros and cons of public v private, as well as the pros, cons and how off going private after being public.
At least you've finally come around to the ridiculousness of 16GB of entry level storage.
I don't agree that Cook is making product related decisions to appease Wall Street. If he was Apple would have released a "low cost" iPhone by now as everyone and their mother on Wall Street was/is saying Apple had/has to do it.
I'm not implying that at all.
This reminds me a bit of Unisys. One failing company buying other failing companies so they can buoy themselves slightly (for a time)
It is a successful strategy for failing, now basically irrelevant, companies (as witnessed by unisys) However it never bodes well for the employees of the company they are acquiring (and that's the tragic part)
Dell sucks, they always have. It just took Mikey dell opening his fat yap one to many times (kind of like Ballmer on that note, Elon Musk should pay particular attention here...) to make people open their eyes and realize that they did. Now that that cat's out of the bag dell is doomed to continue their spiral into insignificance. (just wait for the layoffs to begin at EMC inside a year)
I would say the likelihood of Apple going private is less than 1%. And I don't know what that solves. It's not like Apple can go into hiding or people, especially in the media, would stop caring about what they do if they went private. In the case of Dell, the company wanted to focus more on enterprise services knowing that personal computers are in decline. There's nothing sexy about enterprise tech. The media doesn't care about that. Boring. The space Apple is in isn't boring and the company would have the same high expectations whether they were public or private.