Emc from an International Management Point of View

TABLE OF CONTEXT

1. INTRODUCTION 1

2. EMC BRIEFLY 3

3. PESTEL - analysis 4

3.1. Political / legal 4

3.2. Environmental 5

3.3. Socio-cultural 5

3.4. Technological 6

3.5. Economical 7

4. INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY 8

5. GLOBAL vs. LOCAL 9

6. EMC and CSR 10

6.1. Environmental responsibility 10

6.2. "EMC to help combat greenhouse gas emissions" 12

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

1. INTRODUCTION

I decided to do my individual assignment about a company called EMC. How I ended up particularly choosing this company is for a couple of reasons. First of all I knew some facts about EMC beforehand because my father is an employee in this company. Second, I am quite sure that very few others know anything about it. EMC is a big multinational company, but not that well known in the general public, especially in Finland.

My report will be a short review of EMC's operations generally and after that discussing some matters that influence EMC from an international management point of view. I've decided to emphasize a bit on the part where I discuss corporate social responsibility within the EMC corporation. This is because I find this kind of matters most important in today's

business world, where ethics are more lost than ever. I think of EMC as a great example of how CSR and all things related to it are being handled and brought out in company.

2. EMC BRIEFLY

EMC is the world leader in information storage and management. They help organizations of all sizes, all around the world, to implement Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies that enable them to more cost-efficiently manage, use, protect, and share their information.

EMC customers include enterprises of all size, including almost every industrial sector, eg. banks and financial companies, healthcare, telecommunications, airlines, logistics companies, educational institutions, and the public sector.EMC, established in 1979, has its headquarters located at Hopkinton, Massachusetts. They have over 100 offices and distributors in over 50 countries. EMC has many major computer companies as their partners, such as Dell, NEC, Fujitsu-Siemens, Unisys, Groupe Bull and NCR selling their systems and software. They've also made alliances with leading software, networking and service companies including Cisco, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Accenture, and EDS.

EMC's production facilities are located in Massachusetts, North-Carolina and Ireland. They also have research and development centres in Massachusetts, North- Carolina, India, and Japan with customer support centres in Australia, Massachusetts, Ireland and Japan. EMC has over 23 000 employees working globally, from which 7 000 work in Hopkinton. EMC's revenues in 2004 were $8,23 billion.

EMC is led by a board of directors, which latest addition was Executive Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Phones at Nokia Corporation, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. The Chairman of Board is Mike Ruettgers, and President and CEO of EMC is Joe Tucci. (www.emc.fi)

3. PESTEL - analysis

This analysis is done of EMC corporation in general, which means not all of the areas where they operate are taken separately into consideration. So I won't go through everything that well in depth, for example discussing laws and regulations and how they effect EMC in different countries. The subjects will be emphasized in the way they effect EMC's operations on the whole.

3.1. Political / legal

EMC operates in over fifty different countries and so has to work under different political systems and government regulations. Where ever you start up a business you have to "go by the book", if you want think of this as a long-term employment. This includes taxation, bookkeeping etc. There are many examples why you should not take this regulations and laws lightly, the fines for this kind of malpractices go up to billions of dollars.

In EMC's case the political pressures are more likely to influence their business in different ways than fines. Take for example the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was issued after several major financial scandals occurred in the United States in 2002. The purpose of this act is to protect investors by improving accuracy and reliability within the companies. The security laws and Network Intelligence's audits require companies to collect and protect all data (www.network-intelligence.com). This means they have to storage an extensive amount of information for a long period of time, and this creates more demand for EMC's systems and services.

EMC operates mainly in countries with a stable political environment, and if something would happen that would affect this, headquarters would recommend to pull out and quit operations in this area. But these things are well thought about before moving to a new political and economical environment (interview with...).

Trade restrictions and tariffs don't put distinctive pressure on EMC's operations. This is because EMC mainly imports and exports expert knowledge and services.

3.2. Environmental

Environmentally there are quite a bit of factors that drive EMC to act in certain ways. There are environmental regulations and standards in every country they operate in, and therefore EMC has to take them into account in all actions. In most occasions they exeed the requirements. For example all their manufacturing facilities have followed the ISO 14000 standard.

Other than that there is one example where the environment has affected EMC's operations. This happened when EMC sold their services and hardware to Morocco. Soon after the transaction had been made, EMC's customer care was contacted saying that the equipment wasn't working properly. Once the maintenance team got