EMC insists China not delaying Dell takeover plans

Michael Dell told partners in April that he was aiming to close the deal this week

EMC's chief executive Joe Tucci has insisted that Dell's plans to acquire the firm are not being held up by the Chinese authorities, as the firm reports a 19 per cent profit rocket in its Q2.

Dell announced plans to buy EMC for $67bn (£51bn) - making it the biggest tech merger in history - last October, stating that the deal will close between May and October this year.

At EMC World in May, partners were told by Michael Dell that he planned to have it all tied up by this week. Some weeks later, the firm announced its shareholder vote would take place today, leaving just regulatory approval by the Chinese left to tick off, if the vote goes in favour of the merger.

The firm's CEO Joe Tucci rebuffed the idea that China was delaying the process when questioned by an analyst on EMC's earnings call today.

"I don't think it's delayed," he said. "China has a three-step process and we are following and working with them on that process. Dell actually has a little bit more of a lead. So it's nothing that I'd say is concerning. But they do have a process and they are following their process."

"We are very confident that while people are obviously going to try to pick on us, we are the market leader"

For the three months to 30 June, GAAP net income attributable to EMC rose 19 per cent annually to $581m on sales which over the same period were flat at $6bn.

Since Dell's plans to buy EMC were announced, rivals of both have been keen to try to take advantage, claiming the move will be a distraction for the pair. HPE launched an anti-Dell campaign and EMC rivals have been quick to claim they are stealing its customers as a result of the merger.

EMC Information Infrastructure's CEO David Goulden said EMC is being "picked on", but is not losing customers.

"Obviously people will try to take advantage of an opportunity, but let me make a couple of points," he said. "First of all, compared with Pure [Storage] we have a fundamentally different and more advantageous architecture. We have a system which is designed to scale out and have data services running always on and always on all the time. Pure basically has a dual-control architecture. And that limits their ability to scale out and limits their ability to expand into broader workloads.

"[In therms of] the traditional vendors such as NetApp, I talked about the fact that we are, in fact, picking off their customers... we won their top five accounts during the quarter. So we are very confident that while people are obviously going to try to pick on us, we are the market leader. We're the biggest company in the industry, and we are obviously going through some change. We are very confident, our portfolio has never been stronger, and our competitive position had never been so strong, which is great at this time."