Dell’s Life After Wall Street
A year after spending $24.9 billion taking his computer company private, Michael S. Dell is gleeful to have his namesake firm to himself. And to be done with Wall Street.
On Tuesday, Mr. Dell will show what he has been up to since the seven-month struggle with Mr. Icahn ended last year. At a coming-out party in Austin, Tex., for the new Dell, Mr. Dell will try to persuade people that his company is about far more than the personal computers and computer servers it has been known for, with products intended for things as varied as the cloud computing networks of global enterprises and handy personal devices.
It is a transformation Mr. Dell says he actually started six years ago, spending $18 billion on 40 acquisitions, infuriating investors like Mr. Icahn and confounding industry analysts along the way.
When Mr. Dell first proposed taking his company private, Dell was handicapped by declining computer prices and backbreaking failure to get into hot markets like mobile computing. The only way to fix it, Mr. Dell argued, was to buy out investors and go private so he could stop worrying about profit for a few quarters and remake the business.
The new Dell has software, equipment for data storage and computer networking, services and sensors. It is developing software that measures facial expressions, voice tone, even how we individually swipe key cards.
For Mr. Dell’s plan to work, his company has to get bigger and become better at alliances. Dell has announced deals with Red Hat, a maker of open-source software, regarding building cloud computing systems. His networking equipment also relies on open source.
Even so, his three-quarter stake in Dell is a significant amount of his net worth, estimated at $16 billion by Bloomberg, something that makes Mr. Sacconaghi and others wonder if Mr. Dell will again take his company public at a much higher price.
What Mr. Dell doesn’t yearn for, he said, is a life under the eyes of Wall Street. “I went public in 1988 because we needed the capital, and we needed to be known.”
And now? “Been there, done that,” he said.
Source: NYT-Dell’s Life After Wall Street
