Dell in pursuit of nabbing a share in growth markets touted to be worth over $650 billion

Dell Technologies co-chief operating officer Chuck Whitten has outlined that the company will be pursuing a "classic" two-part growth strategy in FY23 and beyond.

On one side, the company plans to consolidate and modernise its current core business -- PC, compute and networking, storage, and Apex -- that is worth around $670 million as of a year ago, and on the other, it will "pursue logical new growth opportunities where we have a unique right to win", Whitten said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

Specifically, he noted areas where Dell sees opportunities for growth are in markets including the edge, telco, data management, multi-cloud service delivery, security, and AI and ML, claiming there are "over $650 billion of total addressable market".

"They are also markets where the competitive advantages that we build inside our core business, gives us a right to win," Whitten said.

But the move into these markets by Dell is far from a surprise, given that the tech giant has been slowly pushing its presence in each respective market. Just last month, for instance, Dell rolled out a series of new tools and services to help telecommunication carriers take advantage of more cloud-native architectures. Prior to that, it continued to expand its edge portfolio with additional tools to help enterprises with data collection, real-time analytics, and multi-cloud deployment at the edge.

According to Whitten, part of the growth strategy will involve mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

"One of the benefits of our $16.5 billion in debt paid down last year -- and the journey that we've made over the years to become investment grade -- is that we have the financial flexibility to have a balanced capital allocation strategy, including return of capital to shareholders, but also pursue M&A, and we are actively in the market considering M&A," he said.

Whitten assured though, Dell's approach to any M&A deal will be a strategic one that will help "augment our innovation and talent agenda" in its growth markets, rather than large transformation deals like the one that saw Dell acquire EMC.

"We're going to be patient. We realise that particularly those markets have very high valuations today, or at least recently had very high valuations, and we're committed to long-term accretive moves for shareholders," Whitten said.

"So, you will most certainly see us do M&A in the coming years. We think it's an important part of our growth strategy, but we're going to be incredibly disciplined as we do it."

Speaking alongside Whitten on Tuesday was Dell Technologies APJ global cities president Amit Midha, who spoke about how "being the most ethical company" is also part of the company's future goals, especially if it wants to achieve its 2030 social impact "moonshot" goals.

"We want to make sure that we are leading the way in sustainability, which is where one-to-one recycling-reuse comes in," he explained.  

"For every device, we will make sure one device is recycled or reused. We'll continue to increase the recycled or renewed components within our products through that as well. Then of course, we're going to run our operations in such a way that is carbon neutral. Today, our solar panel installation in the Malaysia factory is powering north of 25% of the factory needs and we're going to continue to increase that."

Midha also spoke about how Dell's SheCodes and Mentor Connect programs are helping the company ensure it can achieve equal gender representation in the company.

"I was proud to launch last year SheCodes, where 150,000 girls in India have already benefited and we're going to continue to do more. We're also creating Mentor Connect. This is a cross country mentorship program for women in tech and has gained momentum across Malaysia and Singapore," he said.

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