Dell Goes Private: A Tech Giant's Transition

In February 2013, the American PC manufacturing giant Dell announced a landmark decision: company founder Michael Dell partnered with the private equity firm Silver Lake to take the company private for approximately $24.9 billion. This was the largest leveraged buyout (LBO) since the financial crisis, driven from the company's headquarters in Texas, USA.

The purpose of the privatization was to allow Dell to escape short-term earnings pressure and focus on its long-term strategic transformation. Facing the impact of smartphones and tablets on the traditional PC market, Dell sought to flexibly transition towards high-margin enterprise services and cloud computing after going private, fundamentally changing its market image as a purely hardware vendor.