“GROW AT A PREMIUM TO THE MARKET, GENERATE SUPERIOR MARGINS AND CASH FLOWS,”
Tom Sweet has been a finance leader at Dell since 1997. In that capacity, he would have worked closely with Michael Dell to engineer the finer points of the mega merger between Dell and EMC. Tom continues to do the heavy lifting at Dell Technologies watching the numbers like a hawk.
As the CFO and the head of business strategy, Tom laid out some details about the company’s business strategy and financial plans. But without numbers, maybe because he was addressing tech media and not financial analysts/ press.
Tom articulated the company’s strategy in relation to the financial framework; he said that the company has accomplished a lot, but there was much more to be done. But sans any numbers, it is difficult to comment on them.
Tom did mention with one number during his media interactions that Dell Technologies has been able to pay down in one quarter $7B of its debt from the huge pile of nearly $57B.
From other published financial sources, we know that for fiscal 2017, Dell Technologies had an operating loss of $3.3 billion on revenue of $61.6 billion. Comparing revenues (revenue growth) does not make sense because of the merger between two companies.
Other performance figures available from secondary sources but not alluded to here suggest that the company’s performance in the last quarter had bright spots in terms of good growth in infrastructure group, networking, storage, and client solutions.
Tom helped us visit the company’s vision statement which read thus: To become the essential infrastructure company from edge to the data center to the cloud, not only for today’s applications, but for the cloudnative world we are entering. Pragmatic, not lofty, not abstract; to me it conveys a great sense of relevance to the current market.
The company’s focus from the time the merger was announced in October 2015 to when it was completed in September 2016 to now was to create a unified portfolio and go-to-market strategy, strengthening advisory and services capability.
Tom spelt out the goals for the next two years: to be the clear leader in IT infrastructure and client solutions, be the recognized expert in digital transformation, have the strongest multi-cloud portfolio, provide