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Dell Inc Founder and CEO, Mr Michael Dell, said on Tuesday that the company's business in India is approaching the $2-billion revenue milestone.
Mr Dell, who is on a two-day flying visit to the country, is also upbeat about “unbelievable” opportunities posed by India — a market where it hopes to add a few thousands to its current 23,000 headcount over the coming year.
For Dell Inc, the second largest PC maker in the world, India is important as it is not only a huge market for its PCs and laptops, but also a location for manufacturing and R&D. It also has contact centre operations here.
Citing estimates which have predicted India's rise to become the third largest economy in the world by 2020 and 2030, he said, “Our investments will scale nicely to support that…not just with regard to the local market but also India is a critical part of our global infrastructure, IT services, R&D, manufacturing, analytics - covering all aspects,” said the Dell founder, who is ranked 44th in Forbes list of the world's richest. Mr Dell, 46, has a net worth of about $14.6 billion.
At the FICCI interaction with Mr Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovation, Mr Dell underlined the “enormous” progress that India had achieved over the past decade. He also emphasised the “tremendous” opportunity to come, especially given the factors such as absence of legacy systems, strong mobile subscriber base and new platforms such as cloud computing that give scope to small companies to deploy technology with minimum upfront investments.
He said that over time smaller companies will also evolve as technology users, moving from storage or computing requirements to harnessing IT for better outcomes or results.
“I see tremendous opportunity for India to continue to grow…there are 30-40 PCs for 1,000 people and that number can grow quite a bit,” he said.
India, he said, will continue on its success given the elements like mobile subscriber base. “Also the UID is a fantastic opportunity to apply technology to drive better application of wide range of services,” he added.
On his first day in Delhi, Mr Dell met up with the Unique Identification Authority of India Chairman, Mr Nandan Nilekani. He would also be meeting customers, partners and senior leadership team of Dell India during this visit, before heading off to China.
Technology is also triggering shifts in business models, he said. “If you think of media or commerce, we are seeing fundamental shifts with social media, and sites like Twitter and Facebook…Given its clean slate, India has an unbelievable opportunity to leapfrog and create models that can drive the outcome for the nation,” he said.
Mr Dell was also of the view that functionality and not just low cost will drive usage of devices. “There has to be a balance between cost and functionality… The idea that everyone will go to the bottom has not reflected in market demand,” he said.
Globally, Dell — like its competitors HP and IBM – has been leveraging acquisitions to transform itself from a hardware vendor (a field that is increasingly getting commoditised) to being a solutions provider. Over the past years, the acquisitions by the Round Rock, Texas company including Perot Systems (2009) and EqualLogic (2007) has re-hauled its positioning from a PC maker into a provider of end-to-end solutions.
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