Subj: EMC Well Positioned for Continued Growth According to...
Date: 10/9/98 10:41:24 AM Central Daylight Time
From: AOL News
BCC: JerryCo
EMC Well Positioned for Continued Growth According to Independent Market Analysts and Surveys of Business Leaders
HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 9, 1998-- IT Spending Trends Favor Investment in Enterprise Storage; Market Leader EMC Among FORTUNE's "World's Most Admired Companies"
According to business leaders and market watchers, EMC Corporation, the world's leading provider of enterprise storage systems and software, is highly regarded and well positioned for continued growth and industry leadership -- regardless of the international economic climate. In a series of recent surveys and reports, business executives, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), and financial analysts have pointed to the increasingly strategic role of enterprise storage investments and the broad recognition of EMC as the technology and market leader.
In FORTUNE magazine's prestigious annual list of "The World's Most Admired Companies," published this month, EMC is the highest-ranked new entry in the computer industry category. INDUSTRY WEEK magazine has also named EMC to its annual list of "The World's 100 Best-Managed Companies." Recent CIO surveys conducted by Salomon Smith Barney, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch all single out EMC as one of the companies most likely to fare well despite any capital spending slowdown.
In FORTUNE's worldwide survey of industry executives, EMC ranked fourth among the world's most admired computer companies - behind only Intel, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard -- as the most-admired new entry to the annual list. EMC ranked ahead of Dell Computer, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Compaq Computer. The rankings are the result of a worldwide survey of senior executives conducted for FORTUNE by the Hay Group consultancy. The executives surveyed ranked companies on criteria including overall management quality, product or service quality, innovativeness, value as a long-term investment, financial strength, responsibility to the community and environment, and wise use of corporate assets.
Michael C. Ruettgers, EMC President and CEO, said, "Survey findings such as these, together with EMC's interactions with customers worldwide, underscore our market leadership. There is no doubt that the world is generating more information every day, and organizations need the ability to store, manage and protect that data so they can turn it into competitive advantage. We are reaching the point where information storage is like electricity. It is equally clear that enterprise storage has joined the IT infrastructure's magic circle of vital technologies, along with the operating system, the microprocessor, the network and the applications. Even in environments of slower IT spending and economic uncertainty, leading companies continue to invest in the core technology on which their businesses depend."
All 15 financial analysts covering EMC (visit EMC.com for a full listing) rate the stock as "Strong Buy," "Buy," or "Outperform." Several of these analysts have recently issued new reports highlighting their stance on EMC's prospects:
-- Based on the preliminary results of a new survey of 500 Chief
Information Officers released this week, investment firm Salomon
Smith Barney concluded that spending on data storage technology
is increasingly non-discretionary. In the report, analyst John
Dean wrote, "The need for data inexorably expands by virtue of
the simple use of information technology applications. Data
storage, as the fundamental key to the management of information, constitutes the central strategic asset of the leading companies
in nearly every industry today. The general results (of the CIO
survey) show broad strength in the data storage industry, despite
slowing growth in overall capital spending. Both the survey
results and the historical data tend to support our contention
that, in the current environment, EMC Corp. remains one of the
companies most likely to continue to outperform."
-- In a report issued last week, BT Alex Brown analyst Philip C.
Rueppel wrote: "We continue to view EMC's fundamental position as
unparalleled in our universe. The market is accelerating, EMC's
position is dominant but with still [market] share gains
available, and the competition is behind and usually
disadvantaged by not being an independent, focused storage system
provider. While many technology sectors have experienced a
reduction in growth rates in the past several quarters due to the
impact of Asian economic weakness, we believe the storage system
markets have remained robust.
-- In its latest survey of CIOs, Merrill Lynch found that only 8% are reporting that IT spending is being affected by the
instability in international economies. Merrill Lynch analyst
Steven Milunovich wrote: "If hardware spending does come under
pressure, which products are most vulnerable? Our sense is that
the more distributed the hardware, the more vulnerable it is. PC
upgrades top the list, followed by servers, especially
departmental servers. The data center -- large servers, mainframes, and storage -- appears less likely to get hurt
because of mission-critical needs."
-- Goldman Sachs analyst Laura Conigliaro wrote this week: "EMC is
the company we have the most confidence in. In our discussions
with IT managers, not only was enterprise storage cited fairly
frequently as being difficult to cut, even in the current
environment, but EMC was singled out a number of times as the
vendor of choice for that enterprise storage."
-- At Bear Stearns, analyst Andrew Neff reported this week: "We
believe that EMC is best positioned to benefit from increasing
demand for data consolidation and storage in the enterprise. The
industry leader in data storage technology, solutions, and
customer satisfaction, EMC has taken advantage of several trends: growing demand for data storage as computers and data sources
proliferate; the need for consolidation and protection of
corporate data in what has been a multivendor environment; and
the desire to 'monetize' that data."
EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's technology and market leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent enterprise storage systems, software and services. The company's products store, retrieve, manage, protect and share information from all major computing environments, including UNIX, Windows NT and mainframe platforms. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. For further information about EMC and its storage solutions, EMC's corporate Web site can be accessed at emc.com.
This release contains statements about future growth that are "forward-looking statements" under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could vary materially. Factors that could cause actual results to vary materially include, but are not limited to: component quality and availability, delays in the development of new technology and the transition to new products, the uneven pattern of quarterly results, changes in business conditions, changes and competitive factors in the computer storage market, changes in EMC's sales strategy and product development plans, competitive pricing pressures, fluctuating currency exchange rates, the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines, deterioration or termination of the agreements with certain of the company's OEMs or resellers, risks associated with acquisitions, Year 2000 issues, other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings at the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The opinions noted in this release are those of the quoted firms and/or other parties, respectively. EMC does not adopt or ratify the information or conclusions in such third-party documents, nor does it undertake any obligation to publish any corrective information regarding statements made in such documents.
CONTACT:
EMC Corporation
Mark Fredrickson, 508/435-1000 ext. 77137
fredrickson_mark@emc.com
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