After buying EMC Dell mulls 3,000 job cuts

Marketing, supply chain and general administration workers most likely to be hit

Dell could cut up to 3,000 jobs following its acquisition of EMC last week. The $67bn merger, one of the largest in technology history, saw EMC taken over by Dell to create an organisation of 140,000 employees worldwide.

Dell plans to save $1.7bn in costs over the next 18 months and also to increase sales over that period.

"As is common with deals of this size, there will be some overlaps we will need to manage and where some employee reduction will occur," Dell spokesperson Dave Farmer told Bloomberg.

"We will do everything possible to minimise the impact on jobs. We expect revenue gains will outweigh any cost savings, and revenue growth drives employment growth."

Most of the expected 2,000 to 3,000 redundancies will be made in the US and will effect marketing, supply chain and general administrative workers, according to Reuters.

Dell went private in 2013 when founder Michael Dell put up his own money, in partnership with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, to buy the firm. Part of the funding for the EMC deal will come from the sale of some of its software and hardware assets, such as the SonicWALL firewall division, which is soon to be split off as a separate venture, and Dell's software unit, which is being sold to buyout firm Francisco Partners Management LLC and private equity interests. Much of EMC's value, meanwhile, is tied up in its controlling stake in virtualisation software provider VMware.

Like its rival HP, which split into separate software and hardware companies last year, Dell has been hit hard by the shrinking personal computer market and the rise of cloud vendors. Prior to the deal, EMC had been struggling with weak growth of its own.

The plan is that the new company will focus on converged infrastructure and integrated platforms for cloud. However, if sales do not increase rapidly enough, more lay-offs are likely.