Dell has agreed a deal to buy data storage company EMC for $67 billion.
EMC shareholders will receive $33.15 per share, $24.05 of which will be in cash.
If approved by regulators, the deal would be the biggest in history between two technology companies.
Falling demand for PCs means Dell is looking to expand into more lucrative businesses, and it has identified data storage as a key growth area.
“Our new company will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next-generation IT ,” Michael Dell said.
EMC CEO Joe Tucci said: “The waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era.”
Michael Dell will be chairman and chief executive of the combined group that, Dell said, would be the world’s “largest privately-controlled, integrated technology company”.
The exact cost of the deal will depend on the value of shares in VMware, the software company controlled by EMC. VMware will remain an independent, listed company.
The price per share agreed represents a 20% premium on Friday’s EMC closing share price of $27.86. EMC shares were up about 4% in pre-market trading on October 12.
The deal is expected to close some time between May and October 2016.
A number of Dell Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks users have complained that their laptops “smell of cat urine”.
Dell engineers have ruled out biological contamination, and said the smell was not a health hazard.
The problem lay in the manufacturing process, which has now been changed, Dell said.
Users affected by the issue should send their laptop back for replacement parts.
Customers first raised the issue with Dell’s high-end business laptop in June.
“A few weeks ago I got a new Lattitude 6430u for work,” one user called Three West complained on Dell’s hardware support forum.
A number of Dell Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks users have complained that their laptops smell of cat urine
“The machine is great, but it smells as if it was assembled near a tomcat’s litter box. It is truly awful!”
Other users said they had blamed their cats for the smell.
Dell support technicians initially suggested that users should clean the laptop air vents with compressed air, but users complained that the odor persisted.
In September, a customer known as Malioz raised a concern that the cause of the problem could be to do with the polymer used in the laptop plastics, and asked whether chemicals causing the smell could be a health hazard.
After an investigation, Dell concluded that the odor was not hazardous to health.
“The smell is not related to cat urine or any other type of biological contaminant, nor is it a health hazard,” Dell support technician SteveB said.
The problem was related to the manufacturing process, and had now been resolved, he said.
“If you order an E6430u now, it will not have the issue.”
Dell recommended that users should send affected laptops away for a replacement palm rest and keyboard.
Dell has reported a 79% slide in net profit, underlining a fall in personal computers sales as more consumers shift to smartphones and tablets.
The PC maker’s net profit fell to $130 million in the three months to May 3, on revenue down 2% to $14 billion.
Dell is in the middle of a dispute between founder Michael Dell and two of its biggest shareholders.
Michael Dell wants to take the company private, but some investors oppose the plan.
Dell has reported a 79 percent slide in net profit, underlining a fall in PC sales as more consumers shift to smartphones and tablets
Michael Dell and private equity group Silver Lake have offered to buy back the company for $24.4 billion, and have pledged to shift the business away from PCs to mobile devices.
But its biggest shareholders – the investor Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management – have argued that the valuation of the company is too cheap, and that Michael Dell’s deal is a “giveaway”.
Instead, they have proposed to offer additional shares to shareholders and install mew management.
In its quarterly results, Dell said that revenue from new technologies, services and software, rose 12% to $5.5 billion. That was in contrast to PC sales, which fell 9%.
Dell did not issue a profit guidance for the second quarter due to the ongoing dispute. The company has created a special committee of the board to study the private equity deal and alternative bids.
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