Mark Davison at Dell EMC World in Las Vegas – Back in the 1980s, Michael Dell founded his company on the humble PC and, he says, despite the huge transformation of the company today, it remains an integral and core part of the business.

“Clearly, what Dell Technologies does today is far beyond just the PC,” the current chairman and CEO says. “But the PC is still very important to our customers and to us.

“For us, the average selling prices are going up, not down,” Dell adds, “and revenue and market share is on the rise. We’ve had 17 quarters in a row of gaining market share and, in fact, our 18th quarter will show this too. We’ve invested in innovation and R&D and it’s paid off.”

Dell says that consolidation in the market and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has boosted its PC business.

“I think IoT lends itself to PCs,” Dell continues. “We learned a lot about distributed computing from the work we did in the client business. And with the adoption of technology such as 5G that will connect billions of machines, this will create a new distributed computing model. And then there’s cloud. This is all about data, enormous amounts of data, and not all of that will sit in one place. So you get an even more distributed environment.

“The client business has had a resurgence,” he says. “Business is different today and, along with this, there is workplace transformation. It doesn’t make sense to give people in an organisation the cheapest, lowest-cost computer if you want to attract them and retain them. You give them great tools that inspire both them and their productivity.

“I think that is one of the reasons that the average selling prices are going up,” he says. “The features and capabilities that we build into our PC products is being rewarded. We’re growing this business.

“I think you’ve also got to remember that it is a $170-billion space,” Dell adds. “And we’re all positive that we’ll continue to gain share.”