Michael Dell: We're Enjoying The Freedom And Flexibility We Have As A Private Company

It seems that Dell’s founder, Michael Dell, has become an advocate for companies to go private. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Dell enumerated on the numerous benefits he is enjoying after going public and also shared the future strategy of Dell.

“You know, we're enjoying the freedom and flexibility we have as a private company,” Dell said. “We are not bound by 90-day periods.  We're focusing on our future out several years from now. And we have an enormous opportunity and we've had a great year.  We're growing our -- all of our businesses, all of our businesses are performing quite well relative to the industry.  And it's just a lot easier to focus 100 percent on our customers.”

When asked whether more public companies should go private, Dell replied, “Well, that's for them to decide.  I've had quite a few of them contact me and ask me about how we went through the process and what it was like and that sort of thing.  It certainly wasn’t an easy thing to go through the process, once we got through it, it's been a lot easier managing the business as a private entity.”

Dell revealed, “I think about 20 percent of my time has been freed up […]Well, you think about all of the time spent dealing with governance and preparing for investor activities and dealing with various shareholder requests […] This is really, can be quite distracting, if you try to grow a business.”

Dell was asked if he regrets not having financed Dell’s LBO himself, given that he had the capacity to do so, to which he replied, “Well, the nature of the process really lent itself to ensuring that there was another party involved beyond me and the independent board of directors went through this very rigorous process.  There were actually multiple go shops, as you recall; you guys reported on quite extensively and I think it was about the most rigorous process ever conducted.”

On how Dell’s business is going on currently and growth prospects, Dell said, “We've been able to accelerate our growth rate.  And we've been investing.  We've had seven quarters now in a row of share gain.  Here in the United States in the last quarter in our client business, we grew 19.7 percent.  The total industry grew only 4.7 percent.  But if you take Dell out of the total industry, the rest of the industry grew only 0.2 percent.  So 19.7 percent for Dell; 0.2 for the rest of the industry.”

“All of our businesses are growing and profitable.  We're investing in R&D; we're adding new customers.  And so today we are the fastest growing large integrated I.T. company in the world.  So we've materially increased our investments and our growth.”