Michael Dell roasts HP at EMC World

Dell leader picks holes in rival's strategy

Michael Dell has blasted rival HP at EMC World, insisting the newly split firm cannot "shrink [its] way to success".

EMC World kicked off in Las Vegas yesterday, with around 10,000 customers and partners attending.

EMC's CEO Joe Tucci kicked off proceedings with a short welcome address - insisting the company's best days are ahead of it under Dell - before introducing the firm's founder to the stage.

When announcing that the newly combined company's new name will be Dell Technologies, Michael Dell (pictured at EMC World) took a shot at rival HP.

He explained to the audience that under the Dell Technologies brand, its PC business will continue to trade under the name Dell, claiming its brand recognition is "irreplaceable". He claimed that his company's PC business is faring much better than HP's.

"I hear that in the US, our client business grew four per cent and in the very same period, HP's client business declined 14 per cent," he said. "Plus four for Dell, minus 14 for HP. Dell gained 2.5 points of share in exactly the same period as HP lost 2.4 points of share. Do you see the correlation? It is pretty easy to see who is winning and who is losing."

HP split into two last year - with Hewlett Packard Enterprise taking care of storage and servers, and HP Inc focusing on PCs and printers. The former business is in the midst of a campaign targeting Dell at the moment, with newspaper adverts and social media posts claiming that the Dell-EMC merger means both firms are getting distracted.

Michael Dell said he believes the strategy to get bigger is superior to HP's opposite notion to get smaller.

"Our competitors like HP are shrinking their way to success," he said. "Wait, you can't shrink your way to success. That is not even a real thing! But they're doing it. They are getting smaller. They are separating their edge from their core with far less revenue, less innovation in R&D, less software, a smaller supply chain, losing share in each of their businesses to Dell, even right now during this period.

"We're going in the opposite direction - building scale while fostering speed and agility and innovation. By combining Dell with EMC, we can become the essential technology infrastructure for the next industrial revolution."