The announcement came two years after Dell Inc. returned to private ownership, claiming that it faced bleak prospects and would need several years out of the public eye to rebuild its business. It's thought that the company's value has roughly doubled since then. EMC was being pressured by Elliott Management, a hedge fund holding 2.2% of EMC's stock, to reorganize their unusual "Federation" structure, in which EMC's divisions were effectively being run as independent companies. Elliott argued this structure deeply undervalued EMC's core "EMC II" data storage business, and that increasing competition between EMC II and VMware products was confusing the market and hindering both companies. The Wall Street Journal estimated that in 2014 Dell had revenue of $27.3 billion from personal computers and $8.9bn from servers, while EMC had $16.5bn from EMC II, $1bn from RSA Security, $6bn from VMware, and $230 million from Pivotal Software. EMC owns around 80 percent of the stock of VMware. The proposed acquisition will maintain VMware as a separate company, held via a new tracking stock, while the other parts of EMC will be rolled into Dell. Once the acquisition closes Dell will again publish quarterly financial results, having ceased these on going private in 2013.
What year did Dell go private?
2013