Tom Sweet, Chief Financial Officer, Dell
Our Fiscal Year 2015 was a period of significant strategic progress. We completed our first full fiscal year as a private company, without having to align our business decisions to Wall Street analysts or 90-day financial results. We’re pleased with the outcome and with our accelerating ability to bring you ever-greater value.
Today’s technology industry is in a state of transition, key competitors are evolving or leaving the playing field, and markets are consolidating. We know you’re looking for one company that brings it all together, addresses your technology pain points and helps you succeed. Dell today is in an extraordinary position as the only company that offers a full portfolio of solutions.
Keeping a full end-to-end suite means we can deliver efficiency, ease of use and value that our enterprise customers couldn’t achieve working with multiple vendors to connect and integrate disparate parts of their IT infrastructures.
What further differentiates our strategy is that all our solutions are scalable, standards-based and modular, meaning they grow as your needs evolve. We’re completely focused on helping you overcome your obstacles and capitalize on your opportunities.
Based on your growing appreciation for Dell solutions, it looks like we’re getting it right. In our first full year as a private company, we registered solid overall revenue growth of 4 percent, including increases from all our business units. Our operating income was up 38 percent for the fiscal year. Each of our businesses — Enterprise Solutions, Client Solutions, Services and Software — grew during our last fiscal year. We had balanced year-over-year revenue growth in every region around the world, including key markets such as India, Brazil, China, and the UK, as well as the US.
Our performance enabled us to accelerate our debt pay-down and we closed the year with a strong balance sheet. And in a move that reflects validation of our strategy and strength to serve you, the three major credit-rating agencies earlier this year raised Dell’s corporate family debt rating. That’s important, because it enhances our ability to make the investments in innovation that provide you more value.
Focused on our customer imperatives: transform, connect, inform, protect
Going forward, four principles will continue to guide our end-to-end solutions portfolio: Transforming and optimizing your enterprise with our data center solutions; Connecting people with great devices and capabilities they need anytime, anywhere; Informing organizations through our capabilities in enterprise hardware and software that drive insights for you; and Protecting you through our software, hardware and services solutions in a world where threats are constantly evolving.
For you, this means:
Rapid time to value
Our solutions improve the economic value proposition to help you achieve peak performance more quickly than ever before — without the increasing complexity of many traditional IT initiatives.
Super ease of use
We make the overall experience easy for you, improving productivity so you can get on with what matters most to your business or your life.
Unrivaled flexibility to adapt
Because we have the full portfolio, we’re able to provide IT that accelerates your business agility, enabling you to pursue innovation and operational efficiency.
The right strategy for you and for Dell
Key elements of our strategy also include smart organic investments and targeted acquisitions that bring innovative technologies to market. Throughout FY15, we invested in a number of enterprise startups in the areas that matter most to you, like security and cloud.
As part of our “home-grown” innovation last year, we also invested in building our open networking solutions and our channel relationships, and expanded our research and development, as well as our customer support capabilities. Each of these investment decisions was guided by our desire to serve you better long term.
Our combined scale and ability to provide end-to-end solutions is the right strategy for you and for Dell. We’re proud of the progress we made last year and in our first 31 years as a company. We’re equally excited and optimistic about our ongoing development and hope to continue earning your support and trust in the years ahead.