‘Acceptance of technology is high in Pakistan’

Based in Singapore, Chue Chee Wei is Vice President of Asia Emerging Markets and he is responsible for developing strategy to grow Dell Strategic Business Units. Chee Wei has more than 25 years of experience in the information technology industry and has been with Dell since 1997. He assumed his current role following Dell and EMC merger in September 2016.

 BR Research recently met with Chee Wei to talk about how the broader Dell Technologies portfolio is relevant to an emerging market like Pakistan. An excerpt of the conversation is below.

BR Research: What brings you to Pakistan?

Chee Wei: About two years ago, Dell and EMC merged globally in the world’s largest IT merger. Reporting shifted from Europe to Asia and in that process we grouped all developing countries together. Given the market potential, I was appointed to focus on the Asian Emerging Markets and Pakistan is on this list as the second largest.

BRR: Will you be focusing on Pakistan in terms of higher investment or bigger marketing campaigns?

CW: Previously, our team was based in Islamabad and they were responsible for the whole market. We soon realized that Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad are almost three different countries in terms of language, culture, and even distance – it takes me less time to fly from Singapore to Malaysia than it takes me to fly from Karachi to Islamabad. That’s why we’ve recently invested in setting up dedicated teams for each of the three cities.

The intent is to improve proximity with customers but maintain geographical coverage of the entire market. As a group of companies that has expanded to seven entities that sell everything from PCs and notebooks to storage, networking and visualization, this setup enables us to have dedicated resources taking care of each segment of our key customers.

As you are aware, after the 18th amendment, the provinces hold a lot of authority. Therefore, our localized teams are able to offer guidance to our public sector customers with greater speed and effectiveness.

BRR: In Pakistan, which are Dell EMC’s largest segments in terms of sales and in terms of potential to grow?

CW: Dell EMC is the largest contributor in all segments and as far as potential is concerned, the appetite in Pakistan for consumption and acceptance of technology is high across the board. It depends on how ready the market is to really integrate that technology into the infrastructure.

So for example with VMware, we can bring more expertise in terms of visualization, in terms of security we can work with RSA, Secure works etc. While there is a lot of appetite in the private sector, there is also a need for us to guide our public sector customers. For example, citizens can get better services if the public sector was to modernize its infrastructure. In terms of market, the public sector has the largest potential for all businesses but primarily for the adoption of automation to improve quality of life.

BRR: How has Dell EMC’s offering to customers changed in recent times?

CW: In the past two decades we focused on PCs and notebooks. Around 1999-2000, under Michael Dell’s leadership, we took the strategic initiative to expand the portfolio beyond PCs and notebooks. There was widespread consolidation in the PC markets and we made investment and growth in servers, storage, and networking. This played just right for Dell EMC’s overall portfolio from edge to core to cloud.

BRR: Do you think it is possible that going forward laptops and PCs will become relatively small part of Dell’s business?

CW: We will not defocus or move away from our core DNA. Someone once asked Michael Dell if he will ever sell his PC business, and he answered by pointing to the Dell logo and said, “This is my name and I am committed to this brand”.

BRR: What has been Dell EMC’s investment in Pakistan?

 CW: The dollar amount of investment is not public knowledge. Our investment’s impact is in terms of resources that we are building, both directly and indirectly. Directly, we are building skills and bringing more employment.

BRR: What has been the impact of Dell EMC and how much deeper will it goes?

CW: I think consumption of data continues to grow. My mobile phone has over 700 GB memories, while my wife’s phone has 256 GB. How families interact and entertain themselves add to data consumption. In the past this level of capacity was only possible with a data center.

Other data points and emerging trends and technologies that everybody is talking about are IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning and smart vehicles. Smart vehicles have thousands of sensors, so can you imagine the amount of data that is generated.

A staggering statistic is that the data generated this year will be more than the entire history of data that has been generated from the dawn of time. Next year, it’ll be the same thing again. That’s how much data we’re generating.

This is where Dell EMC is making the most impact: digitizing everything. All this data has to be stored somewhere. This is why we are very optimistic about the company.

BRR: What is Dell EMC’s strategy in Pakistan to grow its business?

CW: Let’s take an example of a bank as a customer. First there is workforce transformation. This refers to the end users’ devices that the banks are using for their tellers and which helps in productivity. So workforce transformation is on the front-end. Second, there is IT transformation which means that they must have the appropriate backend systems in place.

Thirdly, we have digital transformation, i.e. how does the bank or telco allow you to subscribe to services – and finally you need a strong security transformation to protect an entire bank, so that it is not hacked. This is the four pillar strategy of how Dell EMC teams in all three cities will go and talk to customers – it’s the workforce strategy, IT strategy, digital transformation strategy, and security strategy.

BRR: There is no production of anything Dell EMC taking place in Pakistan. Do you think with CPEC there is a chance in say 10-20 years down the road that Pakistan could become part of the global value chain?

 CW: We continue to evaluate more manufacturing sites in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). When we first landed in APJ in about 1995 it was in Malaysia. The reason we opted for Penang was that the Intel processing plant was just opposite our manufacturing location.

Two streets down, we had Seagate. Near us was the molding company that makes the chassis for PCs. Penang was right because of the ecosystem there. Over the years we grew and had a manufacturing plant set up in Xiamen, China for similar reasons.

So, I think we were attracted by the availability of upstream manufacturers. In Penang and Xiamen we had easy access to ports and land routes.Through Penang we could deliver to all South Asian countries.There is potential in Pakistan as the CPEC route comes from China. We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate the situation, of course.