Dell flies through Q3 with 15% revenue growth

Dell Technologies has reported its financials for the third quarter of 2018, with few complaining about15% revenue growth to $22.5 billion.

While the company still has a considerable bill to pay off following the $67 billion acquisition of EMC in 2016, the firm has boasted about paying off approximately $1.3 billion of core debt after three months of positive growth across the group.

“The digital transformation of our world is underway, and we are in the early stages of a massive, technology-led investment cycle,” said Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies. “Dell Technologies was created to meet this opportunity head on for our customers and our investors. You can see the proof in our strong growth, in our powerful innovation and in the depth of our customer relationships.”

With total revenues standing at $22.482 billion, most of the numbers are heading in the right direction. The company is still loss-making, though this has narrowed to $356 million for the last three months and $522 million for 2018 so far, improvements of 13% and 78% respectively compared to the same periods of 2017.

Starting with the Infrastructure Solutions Group, revenue for the third quarter was $8.9 billion, a 19% increase, with the servers and networking delivering its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Storage products saw a 6% increase in revenues taking the total up to $3.9 billion.

The Client Solutions Group saw revenues increase by 11% to $10.9 billion, with Dell suggested strong growth in both the commercial and consumer units. Commercial revenue grew 12% to $7.6 billion, and Consumer revenue was up 8% to $3.3 billion, while the firm outperformed the PC industry for total worldwide units.

In the VMWare business unit, revenue for the third quarter was $2.2 billion, up 15%, with operating income of $768 million. This is one area where the Dell management team feel some of the biggest benefits of the EMC acquisition are being felt, with the dreaded ‘synergies’ tag emerging. However, it’s the external AWS partnership which seems to be claiming the majority of the plaudits.

“Overall, I think yesterday’s announcement at re:Invent just reinforced the momentum that we have in the partnership with Amazon,” said Patrick Gelsinger, CEO of VMWare. “And clearly, the VMware Cloud on AWS, we continue to see great customer uptake for that. We reinforce the expansion of that with the Relational Database Service, the RDS announcement that we did at VMworld and yesterday’s Outposts announcement just puts another pillar in that relationship. So now I’d say, we’re on Chapter 3 of the partnership. And overall, we just can see the continued momentum.”

Dell Technologies is not a company which get a huge amount of press inches nowadays, though trends are certainly heading in the right direction here.