CHRIS Papa is part of that rare breed of Filipinos who opt to give his expertise within the country’s border.
He even accepted to step aside and allow his longtime friend Ronnie Latinazo to take the reins of Dell EMC’s Philippines office. Papa, to note, was the country manager of Dell before the biggest merger in the technology industry occurred.
The BusinessMirror was given an opportunity to sit down with Papa and ask how things are going now with the technology giant.
Is the lackluster performance of the traditional PC—according to International Data Corp. (IDC)—one of the reasons for growing the channel business? And is this performance a silver lining for storage?
In the Philippines, if IDC is the basis, the traditional PC market is still growing. You can also consider strong economic growth. According to the projection, we are one of the better performing economies.
PCs is a segment that is still growing not just in retail but also in general. And of course we are growing faster than the market.
Also, the way we were structured, when Michael Dell started the company, we’ve always been customer-centric, meaning we develop our products based on our understanding of our customers. If you’re a large enterprise, then this is the right product to be positioned for you. If you’re a mid-sized customer, or MSMB [micro-, small- and medium-sized business], this is the best product. If retail, then this product. We’ve always been customer-centric and we’ve been developing products along that line.
Of course, our go-to market will evolve, as well. So meaning, large enterprises—they have a team covering them directly, plus our partners complementing that, because we have a big portfolio in that segment. Mid-market—a lot of them are with our partners. Mostly, when it comes to SMBs, it’s really a distribution model or a value-added distribution model for Dell EMC.
We want to have more customers, we want to work with them closely, and we intend to do or cover them together with our partners. Even our partner profile is varied. There are distributors, in fact, in distributors, there’s volume. Volume pulls for the PC. There’s also value, when it comes to hyperconverged, or converged infrastructure, it’s a value added distribution model. We’re putting all the skills sets, putting the systems together, the POCs, investing on units so customers can actually appreciate it. And we have the resellers, buying from the value added distribution model.
Compared to countries in the Asean region, how is the Philippines?
We are one of the countries that is doing well, with stellar performance. For the last eight quarters, we have been growing quarter on quarter.
Last fiscal year we’ve grown by 27 percent overall business in the Philippines alone. That’s double digit growth fiscal year over fiscal year, which is actually very good performance. And it’s a balance of over achievement.
The large enterprise, commercial, retail, distributors, solution partners—all contributed; all have overachieved. Even on the line of businesses perspective, all have contributed. From client, to servers, storage, all of the segments have done well.
So how about if you segmentize it, how large is the business distribution now? Because EMC, as far as I know, is really growing especially the past three years, two years before it was acquired. How large is it now? In terms of contribution to the business?
I will use IDC numbers for your appreciation because I cannot divulge the exact numbers. According to IDC, the storage business is around $8 million to $10 million quarterly. Combined Dell EMC will have a share of more than 60 percent. And this is server alone: server, Q4 (fourth quarter), IDC ranking in No. 2. We’re quite close to the number one.
When it comes to client products, we are No. 1. When it comes to commercial space (not including retail), we are also number one.
So you can imagine—we are doing well with client, and we are doing well in servers, storage—that’s how we’ve grown really well fiscal year over fiscal year.
Isn’t the market small now in the Philippines? Manila? Where is the growth coming from?
The majority is coming from Metro Manila, but there are also lots of opportunities outside of Metro Manila.
Part of our channel strategy is to work closer and identify partners who are strong in these locations. We’re not just talking about Cebu or Davao, but also North and South Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. A number of partners that we are working with right now have grown significantly, as well. The others, we don’t know personally, but you’ll be surprised. Some are hybrid, some consumer, some commercial and corporate—they’re buying from a distributor.
Our engagement is more of—we provide programs, we let our distributors work with them closely. That has enabled us to reach out to these partners because we cannot cover this, we cannot just hire people just to sell them to these areas. Why reinvent the wheel when we can just work closely with these partners and let their desired distributors work with them.
Is the boom of business-process outsourcing (BPO) outside of Manila helping in your growth?
Definitely. BPOs are expanding their operations in places like Iloilo, in Mindanao, Davao, etc. One of the signs of positive impact is that we were able to get business in these places. The people working in those areas will have extra money too to buy extra gadgets.
In our case, the positive impact is on retail. We have opened one concept store every quarter and we now have 11 concept stores in the country. Last year we opened one in Iloilo and other provinces. There’s a lot in VisMin—Davao, Cebu, Bacolod, Iloilo and Zamboanga. This is consumer, so they carry the Dell branding.