EMC shareholders next month will get the chance to vote on Dell’s proposed $67 billion bid for the storage vendor.
EMC officials have set July 19 as the date for the special meeting, which will begin at 10 a.m., according to the company. The meeting will take place at EMC’s headquarters in Hopkinton, Mass.
The shareholders meeting is one of the last remaining hurdles to be cleared in the deal, which is the largest in the history of the tech industry. Already antitrust regulators in the United States and the European Union have given their approval to the acquisition, and officials with Dell and EMC are now awaiting a decision from regulators in China. At a meeting with analysts and journalists in Austin, Texas, earlier this month, some officials with Dell said they are confident that Chinese regulators will give their OK.
The acquisition is part of a larger push by Dell to transition from simply being a PC box maker to becoming a top-tier enterprise IT solutions and services provider that can better compete with the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM. It comes more than two years after CEO Michael Dell and equity firm Silver Lake Partners spent about $25 billion to buy Dell and take it private.
Dell is expected to take on as much as $50 billion in debt to finance the deal, though the company has sought to sell some assets to help reduce some of the burden. NTT Data, the services arm of NTT Group of Japan, announced in March that it is buying Dell’s services group for about $3.05 billion, and Dell also reportedly is shopping around other businesses, including its Quest and SonicWall units.
For EMC, the deal would settle questions about its future. The company had been under increasing pressure from activist investor Elliott Management to sell or spin off VMware, one of the companies in EMC’s federation business model. EMC CEO Joe Tucci had pushed back at the idea. VMware’s stock price has dropped since the deal with Dell was announced in October 2015, with some analysts worried about whether Dell would continue to invest in the company or use its profits to help pay down the post-deal debt. Michael Dell and other executives have said they intend to continue investing in VMware and will not use its money for the deal.