Rumor: Dell wants to acquire storage company EMC

Dell is said to be in talks to acquire EMC. A possible acquisition would make Dell the market leader in the business storage market in one fell swoop. Part of the talks would be that EMC will divest VMware.

It is not known what acquisition amount is on the table during the talks. The market value of EMC is currently around 50 billion dollars, converted around 44 billion euros. It is not known how Dell plans to finance an acquisition, but it would work with investor Silver Lake for the acquisition. Dell still has more than $11.7 billion in debt, writes The Wall Street Journal, which is the first to report on the current takeover talks.

The plan would be to divest VMware before the acquisition. It is not clear what happened to the security branch RSA. EMC would have been engaged in takeover talks for some time: last year talks would have taken place with HP, among others, and the company would have already sat down with Dell.

EMC employs 70,000 people and is by far the market leader in business storage. Competitors include NetApp, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi Data Systems. However, EMC is struggling to catch up with developments such as cloud storage, mobile applications and big data, and the company is struggling with declining revenues.