Time's up. Let's get started. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Erik Woodring. I lead the hardware research efforts here at Morgan Stanley. Before I get into my guest, let me just read the Morgan Stanley research disclosure. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. I'm delighted to have Chuck Whitten here, Co-CEO, Co-COO of Dell, back again this year. Again, before we get into things, I'll read the Dell Safe Harbor statement. "Dell Technologies statements that relate to future results and events are forward-looking statements based on the company's current expectations. Actual results and events could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the company's SEC filings. The company assumes no obligation to update its forward-looking statements. Awesome. With that said, Chuck, thank you very much for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Happy to have you back again. Yeah. For sure. Let's start big picture. I think it's helpful to start. Let's look back at your January quarter earnings, look back at fiscal 2023 as a whole, do a bit of a postmortem, a bit of a tale of two halves. You know, what's most important to kind of highlight as we look back over the last year? Yeah. Well, look, I think a tale of two halves probably captures it well. We were up 12% in the first half of the year. We were down 9% in the second half of the year as the demand environment sort of deteriorated around us. Net, we were really pleased with our FY 2023 execution and what was clearly a, you know, a difficult and turbulent environment. We delivered $102.3 billion in revenue. That was up 1%. We delivered record operating income of $8.6 billion. That was up 11%. We delivered record EPS of $7.61. That was up 22%. I think we were most pleased, not surprisingly, by the performance in our ISG business. That business was $38.4 billion. That was up 12%. You know, we saw record server and networking revenue performance. We saw a record storage performance. We delivered record operating income of greater than $5 billion. You know, in particular, I think the storage business performed really well. You saw us exit Q4, you know, growing that business 10%. A lot to be excited with in a very, you know, very difficult year. You know, in this environment, we have a bit of a mantra that we're gonna focus on what we can control. Mm-hmm. The first point of emphasis for us is always on our relative performance and share gain. In the commercial PC business, we gained share again. It was 140 basis points overall. We also gained share in the commercial business excluding Chrome, which is a very important profit pool for us. In servers and storage, we're very confident we're gonna gain at least 100 basis points of share when calendar results are reported here shortly. Look, it's a challenging environment. I know we're gonna talk a little bit about that as we go through the day. You know, our recipe of focusing on what we can control is, you know, what we're gonna stay focused on, our cost position, pricing discipline, Mm-hmm driving our innovation agenda, relative share, you know, and of course, you know, continuing to invest in our team and culture as we've been doing. Perfect. Let's quickly discuss maybe what you cannot control. That is the macro environment. Maybe just help us understand how you guys are thinking about the world today from a macro perspective, what you're hearing from customers, both on the PC and on the ISG side. Sure. Let me maybe break it into sort of two parts, what we're seeing right now Sure that kind of influences our Q1 guidance, and then maybe some perspectives on the year- Please based on what we're hearing from customers. The challenging environment that we started to describe in Q2 of last year has persisted into Q1. You know, we saw, you know, first slowdown last year in Q1 in our consumer PC business. It was followed in Q2 by our commercial PC business. Late in Q2, we talked about a slowdown in the server business. The storage business has held up really, really well, although we started to see some signs of caution I'm sure we'll talk about today in Q4. You know, that backdrop has persisted. The operative word I would say is just caution in the spending environment. Mm-hmm. We're seeing customers be very deliberate in their spending. You know, IT budgets have held up reasonably well, maybe eaten in a little bit by inflation, but held up reasonably well. There's just a lot of deliberation, more approvals, all the types of things that you kind of see in a caution environment. You know, we saw that texture pretty consistently by geography, by vertical, by customer size. You know, geography, North America probably performed a little bit better for us given the strong storage quarter. Mm-hmm. China was a little bit worse for logical reasons, but otherwise, geographies were very, very similar. Okay. You know, we saw some strength in financial services and construction and real estate, but, you know, elsewhere, I'd say the verticals were very consistent. Largely, customer sizes didn't really show us any difference either. Look, it's a cautionary, you know. Mm-hmm kinda back-backdrop. That's the year we're entering. That sort of anchored our sort of comments on Q1. If you pull back to the full year, you know, we're optimistic that we're gonna see a return to sequential growth as the year progresses. There's really a couple of things that underpin that confidence. You know, the first is just, you know, based on what I just described of when we saw slowdowns in our businesses, Yep you know, you look at prior downturns, those tended to be four to six quarters in our segments. We're deep into that now as we come into Q1. I think more important is the texture I hear from customers, which is, "Look, we're still committed to technology spending." Right? "It is too central to my business." The blurring of business and technology budgets is real. What we're seeing is not an outright cancellation of projects. They're still planning projects in infrastructure. They're just delaying them, and there's only so long you can do that. On the PC side of the business, look, it's been a profound and permanent shift in hybrid work. Mm-hmm. We're coming up on three years since that rush of, you know, of COVID devices. 62 million PCs were sold in the first nine months of 2020. You know, history would tell us we're, you know, we're due. So is the importance of that device to sort of talent and business. Right. Okay, perfect. I think with that backdrop laid, let's get into the segments. We'll start on PC. Clearly the top of investor mind. Help us understand how you are thinking about the PC market in 2023. Maybe, you know, things to touch on would be, you know, end market demand, channel inventory, pricing. Then I'd love, you know, at the end of that, I don't want this to just be near term, maybe as you think about two or three years down the line, what does the PC TAM look like relative to today, relative to pre-COVID levels? Yeah. Well, I just gave you the flavor a little bit about what we're seeing coming in, coming into the quarter. You know, it's a challenging backdrop. As you would imagine in a sluggish demand, deflationary environment, you know, we saw price competition. Mm-hmm. It was probably most acute in the consumer business, where we saw competitors with higher levels of channel inventory using front and back-end rebates to kind of try to clear that channel inventory. We saw competition in the largest bids out there in the commercial PC space, as well. You know, on a pricing standpoint, our business actually performed quite well, on a total revenue per unit basis, we actually saw an increase in our business. Big one. That was a combination of, you know, favorable mix, not just more commercial and less consumer, but a trend that I've called out, and we've been seeing, you know, richer configurations as the PC is asked to do just so much more in hybrid work, but also more attach of displays, peripherals, services around the box. That's, you know, that's been beneficial. Again, we've factored in into our guide and our operating plans the normal level of competitive pressure that you would sort of anticipate. Mm-hmm. There's good news underneath the surface there in our sort of TRU performance because of the attach. That's, look, that's the current environment. If I go back to sort of what do we think the TAM will do, Yeah I'll probably just stay in this year for now Sure versus speculate. You know, our models now would put us right around maybe just under 260 million units. As I, you know, think I've pointed out in the past, I think we have, as an industry, done a disservice by talking about aggregate units. Mm-hmm. Because the reality is, not all units are created equal in the industry, and our business has been principally centered and focused on the most lucrative profit pools, which are the commercial business and the premium consumer space. If you look at the commercial business, a commercial PC is 3.1x more valuable on an ASP basis than a Chromebook. In the premium consumer space, so greater than $800, a premium consumer device is 2.7x more valuable than a mainstream consumer device. What I urge everybody to do is look at pre- and post-pandemic, not just units, but units by those sub-segments with ASPs, and what you'll see is there's just a much richer and larger profit pool. By the way, if you went to displays and peripherals, you'd see the same thing. Look, that's what gives us confidence in the TAM long term, is it's a richer profit pool. That's where we built our business. That's where the operating margins are higher. That's where we have an advantage given our direct motion and our years of investment in the space. And we just see it as so central to the not just productivity inside the workforce, but making hybrid work, you know, continue to function effectively Yep that we're gonna see growth in that market. We're seeing caution right now. I think every company is trying to decide, "When do I hit go on a refresh?" That refresh is coming. Right. you know, earlier you talked about sequential growth in PCs. You talked about, if we look back at past recessionary periods, there's a kind of four to six -quarter cadence, which I think is very insightful as we think about this year. Are there other factors that give you confidence in how you kind of think about the year starting from this quarter through the end of the year in terms of thinking, "Hey, maybe there will be or there should be an improvement in the second half because of these factors"? Yeah. You know, look, I think I touched on it. I think it's both a combination of how long we've been into the downturn in these, in our segments. I think it's the customer tenor and texture that, you know, we're feeling. You know, my other observation would be, you know, we've seen a distortion and tilting of spend, pretty massive one in IT budgets over the last few years. It was first a swing to hybrid work, right, to enable that and user focus. It then swung very quickly to infrastructure to be able to enable all those devices we put out there, but also online transformation that you had to do in the sort of pandemic. Most recently, look, it has evolved away from hardware, Mm-hmm infrastructure hardware and PCs in favor of non-hardware categories like Security, like BI and Analytics. Mm-hmm. That pendulum will come back. I mean, I think one observation is, even in light of all the macro challenges that are out there and uncertainty, IT budgets have remained, you know, pretty resilient. Yeah. You know, our job is to not just, you know, wait for all of our markets to come back, but remember, we're structural share gainers in our business, so we still have a lot of headroom in each of those markets, whether the market goes up or the market comes down. Yeah. Okay. Let's shift to the ISG part of your business, the enterprise-focused side. It's been a unique cycle, kind of just as you explained, it's been challenged by supply chain shortages. That's kind of pushed demand at least out, or at least the way that you recognize that demand out. How are you thinking about servers and storage as we go You know, over the next 12 months? You touched on it at the top, but maybe if we double-click on that. You know, look, it's, we had a great ISG year, as I said, with $38.4 billion record operating income, record revenue in each of the businesses. You know, look, this has been eight quarters of growth for us on a P&L basis, so we're one, lapping, you know, some pretty strong growth. Two, there is a normal digestion cycle that happens in, you know, in the server business. You know, we're still seeing that caution I mentioned in the server business persist. The storage business performed really well last quarter, you know, up 10%. We saw broad strength across the portfolio, you know, hyper-converged infrastructure. Our PowerFlex product, PowerStore continued to grow in the mid-range, data protection. We saw a very strong foundation of storage growth. You know, our caution in what we're seeing in the environment is we saw lots of strength in the largest customers. Mm-hmm. Weakness and declines in our medium and smaller business. That tends to be a leading indicator for us of sluggishness coming in the storage market. We have cautioned frequently that, you know, the storage business is not immune to what we see in broader IT spending. It tends to lag the server business. Mm-hmm. It also has less amplitude, right? That's kind of what we expect. Look, that's the current environment. I think you can understand a lot about what we think at this point about the full year by just looking at our guidance. Yep We gave a mid-20 guide, down in ISG for Q1. We said that the company overall for the year will be down mid-teens, and I think that Tom gave some hints in Q&A that you should sort of think of ISG and CSG as being pretty closely stacked on top of each other. I think that'll give you, if you sort of think about sequentials from where we're starting in Q1, a feel for the ISG business. Yeah. Okay, perfect. You know, something that has emerged in our conversations, let's call it over the last three months, is this kind of concept of optimizing cloud spend. It can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Curious, if you're hearing that, if you're seeing that, is that temporary? Is that structural? You know, how does that impact on-prem spending and your ability to gain wallet share with customers, realizing that you have this very clear hybrid cloud solution? Yeah, I think in order of your questions there, I would say, yes, we're seeing it. Yes, I think it's structural, and yes, it's good for us. I'll elaborate a little bit. Perfect. I'd say, look, you know, fact, undeniable. It's on PowerPoint charts I see all over the conference here. You know, public cloud spend, it's still growing, but it's moderated. Mm-hmm. I think what's important is the tenor as to the why when you talk to customers. Yeah underneath that. It is, hey, maybe my original premise of not just a CapEx to OpEx pivot, but a more cost-effective solution hasn't panned out. More importantly, it's been the cost unpredictability that has been the biggest challenge in this environment. I think maybe the other trend. Obviously that's good for on-premise spending, right? Yeah. That's causing people to look and say, "Look, for cost, you know, I may want to have more resilience and on premise." I think the bigger, broader arc is customers are also thinking about public cloud spending in a much more sophisticated way, which is: What do I like about the public cloud? Why am I still spending at the rates I'm spending? I like the feature velocity. I like all of the innovation that these public clouds generate. Frankly, I like the ability to burst up and down. Mm-hmm. Public clouds are going to be part of my architecture, but that leads us to what you said, which is, "I'm going to have a multi-cloud environment. I'm going to have multiple public clouds, so I can have the right cloud for the right job. I'm going to have where I need cost, security, control of the environment, on-premise clouds. As data explodes at the edge, I'm going to have edge clouds." That's both good for our business on-premise. It's also good for the company that's built its ISG strategy around trying to solve the challenges of multi-cloud. You've heard us talk about we have a ground-to-cloud strategy. That is our Project Alpine. Can we put our proprietary software, storage software into the public cloud so you have operational consistency across on-premise and public clouds? Ground to cloud to ground, you know, not just our VxRail and VMware environment franchise, but you know, we have 70% of Azure Stack HCI deployments in the world on our infrastructure. You've long been able to run Anthos and EKS anywhere on our PowerFlex validated designs. A plug, much more coming from us at Dell Technologies World. That's the opportunity for us, not just to protect sort of traditional on-premise spending, but go enable and help support what is a really complex multi-cloud world for our customers. You know, you touched on this, as you talked about being a structural share gainer, and I'd love to just get into what those factors are that drive that. It's scale. It's the fact that you have your fingers in a lot of different businesses. It's the fact that you're multi-cloud. What am I missing when I think that, hey, Dell's been executing fantastically. They've been gaining share. The reason is X, Y, Z. I think we always like to say it's not a single thing, it's our business model. It's an integrated business model. I think, you know, one is, look, it starts with, you know, I think we build the best solutions in our marketplace, right? Our laptops are smarter, more intelligent, more portable, have better battery life. We build exceptional servers that are built for modern workloads. Our storage portfolio is unparalleled. Leadership across all types of storage protocols and all. It's also our sales force. We touch more customers than anybody. We have a supply chain team that you study in business schools, right? That navigated this last period of shortage, you know, I think better than anybody. We have a global services footprint that's the largest of any of our peer set that allows us to. It's not just boots on the ground there to fix your devices. It's predictive and proactive telemetry that solves problems before they happen. We have a Dell Financial Services capability that right now is a counter-cyclical part of business. You put all of that in the blender, and you say, "We just have an advantage business model." It's a combination of scale. It's a combination of those capabilities. Right. We still have tons of headroom in each of our markets, right? You know, across all of our three principal business, we are safely below 30% market share. There's still plenty of headroom. Right. Perfect. I guess maybe if we shift to the cost side a bit, you know, we've talked about a handful of let's call them structural tailwinds, whether that's mix shift, whether that's services attached. There's also been some cyclical factors that have impacted you guys: FX, logistics, commodity costs, inflationary pressures. Those seem to be. The winds seem to be shifting, so to speak. And you also announced a cost reduction plan. Help us kind of package all of those together to understand how we think about margins trending going forward. Again, the most important puts and takes. Yeah, let me unpack kind of, 'cause it's all going into the blender. You know, I'd start, look at the gross margin level for our year. Next year, you should anticipate us improving gross margins, call it about 100 basis points. That's really a combination of a couple of factors. It's gonna be the mix shift towards storage in our business. Mm-hmm. It's gonna be an improvement in the operating or the gross margin performance of our server and storage business due to a combination of the deflationary costs you mentioned and, you know, continuing high services attached. That's the kind of gross margin level. I would say OpEx reduction is gonna be a tailwind. I think you have to factor in, when you look at our business, the fact that we are descaling, so there's some operating margin pressure because of that. Let's go through the other puts and takes. You know, INO is gonna be up $200 million. That's effectively the implications of our DFS originations in a higher interest rate environment. What you would see us having counseled that our tax rate is higher. Mm-hmm to a 24%. That's just the mix of tax or, you know, where income is generated in jurisdictions. Then we gave you a sort of range of 737 million - 742 million shares. You know, for Q1, I think that's a good frame for the year. You put all that into the blender, you're gonna come up with our kind of down mid-teams revenue, but $5.30 guide. I think those are the puts and takes. Okay, perfect. Again, looking beyond this year, you know, at your Analyst Day, you know, maybe whatever it was, 14, 16 months ago, you kind of talked about this new Dell that has emerged, one that grows top line kind of low single digits, 3%-4%, mid-single digit EPS growth longer term, kind of normalized. Is that still how we all should think about this Dell business going forward? Again, in normalized- Yeah, I think that's the right long-term framework. You know, 3%-4% revenue growth, 6% compounded annual EPS growth. We'd say net income to free cash flow conversion at greater than 100%, and then a commitment to, you know, returning 40%-60% of Adjusted Free Cash Flow to shareholders, and I think that's still the frame. Right. Okay. Let's hit on capital allocation. I want to come back to an important topic. On capital allocation, you've made significant progress. You've worked your leverage down. You're close to that 1.5x core target range. You've communicated 40%-60% return, free cash flow return to shareholders. You just raised your dividend 12%. A lot taking place. How do we think about your capital allocation priorities over the next, let's call it one to three years? Is there flexibility to accelerate shareholder returns? What would you have to see to maybe feel more comfortable to do that? Yeah, look, I mean- It's a big question. Yeah, it's a broad question, but I think you got all the components, which is like, first, we're committed to this balanced capital allocation. We like the framework a lot. You know, last year it was $3.8 billion in capital return. That was a combination of 64.2 million share buyback, and then roughly $1 billion in our dividend. As you said, we stepped up the dividend 12% from $1.32 to $1.48. You know, let's go through the other, you know, potential uses. We're happy with our leverage right now. We're investment grade. We're committed to being investment grade, but, you know, there's not an urgent pressing. Mm-hmm you know, debt pay down issue. You know, M&A, I think we've been repetitive to the point of dull with that, look, our M&A strategy is focused on talent and technology acquisitions that enable our new growth businesses, and they're of the scale that it's not gonna distort our capital allocation priorities. In fact, we just did one in Q4. I was a bit surprised we didn't get a question on the call. We bought an asset called Cloudify that is a cloud orchestration software that will go into our edge environments as part of our Project Frontier effort. Those are the types of assets we're pursuing. Right. The reality is that's the, you know, that's the use. We will You know, from a buyback perspective, we have said, "Look, you know, job one is let's be, well, let's manage dilution. Mm-hmm. You know, we will be opportunistic when we see the, you know, see the stock at a fair value. You know, I think given the frame I described, 40%-60%, that gives us a lot of flexibility, you know, as we move forward. Okay, perfect. Talk of the conference, is AI. I've heard that, yeah. Yeah. You played it. You have, yes. You know, maybe just talk about how Dell is uniquely kind of positioned to benefit from the growth of AI workloads, whether it's partnerships, whether it's edge compute, server price. You know, help us understand what it is from Dell that allows you to generate value from this conversation about AI. Yeah, sure. I mean, look, I think one is we've been participating in, you know, sort of the growth of AI for a long time, which is great. We're glad to hear the dialogue from customers. This is not a new trend. This is a long mega trend Mm-hmm that we've long called out. You know, I'd say there's a few applications in our business. You know, I'd start with one is AI is embedded into our solutions to make them better. Whether it's our workload optimization, the way we manage power and efficiency, the telemetry we use in our services, right? It's part and parcel of how we build our infrastructure and our PCs. You know, second, we've long worked with customers to develop solutions and platforms in conjunction with ecosystem partners to deliver on AI solutions. That could be, you know, loss prevention in retail Mm conversational AI, right? We apply, you know, AI to our business processes as well, right? Forecasting and supply chain, you know, customer service, obviously, you know, finance. We have, you know, lots of applications. It's, it's improving our business. The net of it, if you look at it from a shareholder standpoint, is it's driving the richest growth in profit, you know, pools and infrastructure, and we're gonna benefit from that tailwind. Excitingly for us, if you step back and look at the AI market, you're gonna see it kind of be into two buckets. The, the broad kind of unbounded AI that you see, you know, what's impacting Bing, and you hear the conversation about. I think more exciting for us is, hey, look, the application of these models and inferencing to private data sets. Because if you're gonna do a medical diagnosis or you're gonna do customer service, if you're gonna do, you know, proprietary security analysis, you're gonna wanna control your infrastructure. Mm-hmm. You know, that's our core business, right? That's, that's what we've been working with customers on for a long time. Okay. Perfect. I'd be remiss, we have a couple of minutes, if I didn't ask you about APEX. It's been a growing initiative for you guys. You know, just help us understand where APEX is today, what the signposts are that we should be looking for as we look out over the next few years. Sure. I mean, look, APEX continues to perform really, really well. We announced that, you know, in last earnings, we doubled the number of customers. You know, in Q2 of last year, we announced that we crossed the milestone of $1 billion of ARR. We just have a lot of customer interest. It, it won't surprise you that in this environment, as customers are trying to optimize every dollar, you know, flexible consumption alongside a modern cloud experience, it's a really attractive value proposition. By the way, as is our DFS Mm-hmm business, which had 12% originations up. It's, you know, and we've continued to steadily expand the portfolio of APEX, which we're committed to doing. Look, we get a lot of questions from investors about, you know, milestones they should be gauging on- Yeah on APEX. You know, I think we're very cognizant that, you know, given the size of that business, we don't want to get on the hamster wheel every quarter sort of talking to you about it. I think the milestones we're focused on is, let's continue to acquire new customers. Let's continue to broaden the portfolio of APEX solutions so that a customer can look at what Dell offers and say, "I can buy it, I can subscribe to it, or I can subscribe to it with your managed service. Mm-hmm. You know, it'll continue to grow. We, you know, we're very happy with APEX. We just, you know, we wanna be our typical understated selves when we talk about it. Stay tuned. More to come. More to come. Totally understand. Yeah. Cool. We have just a little bit over a minute. I wanna leave you with a couple of minutes to just kind of tell us, the audience, clearly it's a tough environment, you are now entering year two of this kind of exciting post-VMware spin Dell, plain vanilla Dell. You know, what are you most excited about? Why should investors be excited about kind of the Dell story as we look out from here? Well, look, I think it's time for long-term investors to take a relook at Dell. I'd say it a couple ways. You know, shareholder value is created based on your market position, your strategy, and your execution. I think on the first two, look, we've built something that looks unlike anybody else in technology, and it's been through a series of different and often contrarian bets Mm-hmm about the markets. The net of it is, we have leadership positions in all of our markets, leaders in x86 servers, leaders in every storage category, leaders of the commercial PC business. We're structural share gainers. We've gained 10 points of share over the last 10 years in the commercial PC space. We've gained 9 points of share over the last 10 years in the server space. Our storage business, which is bigger than number two, three, and four combined, has grown four consecutive quarters as we've overhauled the entire portfolio. As I said earlier, we'll gain share this year. I think more importantly than those positions is the tailwinds are at the back of these markets, right? It is gonna be a hybrid multi-cloud future. Data is exploding at the edge. The PC is central to every business in the future of hybrid work. That's strategy and market position. I think the most important part of the thesis for Dell that investors should pay attention to is, I'd put our execution up against any company in any industry. I think we have the highest say-do ratio of any company in the space. We have, over the last three years, grown our revenue 6% on a compounded annual basis, 18% EPS growth on the same basis. We've generated $18.5 billion in free cash flow over the last four years. As I said, we've been a steady share gainer. We've generated $4.5 billion in capital returns to shareholders since we announced the return policy in September 2021. We've done a whole series of other things to simplify the capital structure, spin out VMware. Look, I hear a lot of investors at the conference ask us, "Hey, I buy all of that, but I'm waiting for that macro moment. When's the right exact moment to jump in?" I guess I would just say, "No better time than the present when you have a business that's competitively advantaged with market tailwinds, with, you know, a management team that has, you know, a tremendous say-do ratio." I'll just end where I started, which is it's time to take a relook at Dell Technologies. Perfect. Awesome. Chuck, thank you very much for spending time with us. Awesome. Thank you.