Sue,
Asia is only about 5% of EMC's revenues and is a future area of growth.
I'm from the Philippines and, if you look at the map, it's a natural gateway to Asia. It also has a deeply spiritual pool of English-speaking programming and animation talent. The conventional way of doing business there has been to multiplex cash flows via conglomerates with a banking, insurance, consumer products manufacturing, distribution, real estate, and telecom components, among the most common. The Asian economic crisis has already started to change that.
Network computing and the internet are eventually going to change the way business is done there. The distribution system, for example, is very antiquated and multi-layered because credit and delivery are often bundled with the sale which allows different distributors with varying pools of capital to prosper. There is also a major build-out of the wireless and landline telecom infrastructure amidst the ongoing Asian economic crisis and the resulting cash squeeze is creating a huge economic disincentive for most companies to use networked storage products with mainframe class reliability and security like Symmetrix.
I spent most of last year there and I tried to assist a friend who owns a chain of internet cafes bring the internet to a small town 60 miles away from a major southern city in a region where there is a tragic war going on between Catholics and Muslims, but the dollar-linked tariffs made the venture too prohibitive. America is the world's most valuable "brand" and the internet is the most cost-effective way to introduce an agricultural community thirsty for knowledge to American technology, among other things. Someday that will be possible.
Gus |
