Dell’s CFO Tom Sweet has a $3-billion target for his team in India

BENGALURU: Computer maker Dell is aiming to cross $3 billion in India revenue in a year or two, Chief Financial Officer Tom Sweet told ETin an interview. The company’s revenue from the country currently stands at nearly $2 billion.

“We’re on a nice trajectory. A year ago, I made a public statement where I said we would be close to $2 billion (in revenue). We are about to eclipse that and I have given the leadership team their next challenge— get to three ($3 billion),” Sweet said.

Dell, which went private in 2013, competes with global rivals Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and IBM in India’s nearly $50-billion IT market. Sweet said being a privately-held company is helping Dell make investments in countries such as India without any short-term, quarterly focus.

“I think being private has allowed us a bit more flexibility about not being quite so quarterly-focused around the financial results. We are still focused on making sure we do have good quarterly results, but not to the extent that we slow down investments,” Sweet said.

Sweet said Dell today is thinking much more about the returns it will get in three, five or seven years on the investments it is making today.

“Being a public company, there were times when we perhaps slowed down investments depending upon how the quarter was looking,” Sweet added.

Dell, which started accepting bitcoins in July last year, said the experience so far has been “a success”.

“Bitcoin has been a good success for us. It’s not a huge volume to be honest, but the optionality that we accept it, sent a positive signal to the new and emerging paymentrun industry around the globe,” Sweet said.

“Bitcoin gives our customers another option about how they want to interact with the company.” Sweet also said that Dell Ventures, the company’s corporate venture arm, is looking to invest in Indian startups.

“At any one point in time, we were looking at 10 or 15 different investments. I don’t see that slowing down in the near future,” he said.

“We are active. We are looking. We haven’t actually made any investments yet, but clearly it is an up and coming area for us to get involved with.”