EMC Blames Poor Quarter On Russia, China

EMC has reported first quarter revenues of $5.61 billion (£3.7bn), falling short of analyst expectation of $5.74 billion (£3.8bn).

“We fell a bit short on first-quarter storage revenue due to geo-political factors in Russia and China and not executing as crisply as we had expected in the first quarter,” said Joe Tucci, EMC. “That said, we are confident that we will meet our business outlook for the year.”

The storage player’s sales in its information storage business fell 1 percent, but sales from acquisitions were up, with sales of flash-memory chips up 3 percent.

Bearing fruit

“Our investments in high-growth areas are bearing fruit, and the scale and strength of our federated businesses continue to provide a steadily increasing number of large, multi-national customers with the capabilities needed to build their digital agendas and undergo massive IT transformations,” added Tucci.

The financial results came as EMC announced a partnership with Iron Mountain to sell cloud backup services. The partnership, described by both parties as “natural”, will see the firms helping customers with an on-premise and off-premise data protection strategy.

“We’re excited to have Iron Mountain as a Cloud Service Provider in our Business Partner Program,” said Jim Clancy, senior vice president of Data Protection Solutions, EMC.

“When you consider Iron Mountain’s security, compliance and off-site data protection expertise combined with EMC’s market-leading technology, the result is a solution ideal for our shared customers.”

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