EMC reported revenues of $7.01 billion during fourth quarter (Q4) of 2015, essentially the same as Q4 2014 but short of Wall Street analyst expectations of $7.12 billion. The company booked $1.3 billion in profits, an earnings-per-share performance of $0.65, in line with analyst estimates.
For the entire 2015 fiscal year, EMC generated $24.78 in revenues, a 1 percent year-over-year increase. This comes despite a dip in annual sales in EMC’s traditional enterprise data storage division.
Last quarter, the company’s Information Infrastructure business experienced a 4 percent year-over-year decline in sales to $5.07 billion. For the year, sales fell 2 percent to $17.89 billion.
During an earnings conference call this morning, Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, described his company’s financial performance during Q4 as “mixed” before expressing his disappointment in falling “a bit short on revenue.” Tucci said 2015 was “a tumultuous year” punctuated by sharp declines in sales in emerging markets. Geopolitical unrest in Russia and the Middle East, economic challenges in China and a strong U.S. dollar added to the company’s challenges in the marketplace.
The IT-buying landscape is also experiencing a shift, Tucci observed.
“As companies transform their businesses, we see them changing their traditional operating model and buying patterns,” said Tucci. “To fund these new initiatives, customers are reducing costs in their traditional applications and infrastructures. As a result, this is one of the most disruptive periods in the history of IT for vendors as they manage customer transitions from the old to the new.”
One bright spot is flash storage. Since launching its XtremIO all-flash arrays, the division has “experienced explosive growth and is the clear market leader by a wide margin,” said Tucci. EMC is also working on incorporating the latest flash storage technologies into its VNX and VMAX enterprise storage arrays, he added.
Finally, addressing the massive Dell-EMC merger, Tucci said the deal is “on track under the original terms and timeline. On Oct. 12, the companies announced that Dell was acquiring EMC for $67 billion, as amount that qualifies the transaction as the largest technology deal in history. The deal is expected to close in mid-2016.
“Our new company will be incredibly well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, cloud, mobile and security,” said Michael Dell in an open letter to customers announcing the acquisition. “We are extremely advantaged by having a foundation to build upon that features two of the world’s greatest technology franchises with leadership positions in servers, storage, virtualization and PCs.”