Dell Inc is considering strategic options including a public stock offering, people familiar with the matter said, as the corporate-technology company seeks ways to boost revenue and raise funds.
The board is scheduled to meet later this month and is to discuss its options, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private.
Texas-based Dell might also decide not to make any such moves at this time, the people said.
Founder and chief executive officer Michael Dell took his company private in 2013, when he teamed up with Silver Lake Management LLC on a leveraged buyout. That freed Dell to cut costs and work to become a bigger supplier of hardware and software for corporate data centers without the quarterly investor scrutiny that comes with being a public company.
Three years later, Dell acquired storage-technology provider EMC Corp and its majority stake in data-center software vendor Vmware Inc, taking on a massive debt load to seal the US$67 billion deal.
Raising cash could help the company further expand or pay off some of the debt.
Dell has about US$46 billion of debt, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
That includes about US$3 billion of bonds maturing this year and US$4.35 billion due next year while the company also has loans outstanding, the data showed.
Another option is to buy the rest of VMware that Dell does not already own, a person familiar with the discussions said.
VMware shares have risen more than 60 percent in the past year.
Dell is also considering a public share sale for its cloud-computing venture, Pivotal Software Inc. Dell met with bankers last year to discuss that possibility and was told the company could fetch a valuation of between US$5 billion and US$7 billion, one of the people said.
Still, any Pivotal offering might wait until the company has converted more of its business into wider-margin software and subscriptions and away from less-profitable services businesses, the person said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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