EMC Comes In From The Wilderness

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 1, 8:53AM EST

Stocks: (EMC)(IBM)(DELL)(HPQ)

EMC has been on the outs with Wall St. for a long time. Over the last five years the S&P is up about 50%. Other big techs are up, with HP rising over 60% since late 2001. EMC is down close to 25%.

Finally, it appears that the company is making headway in its core storage business. EMC had the fastest revenue growth among major storage companies in Q3. Its share rose to 21.4% from 20% a year ago. Revenue grew 18% for the third quarter. In the second quarter, EMC revenue growth lagged significantly at only 3%.

EMC also put more distance between itself and the second place firm, Its share fell from 19% in last year’s thrid quarter to 17.4%.

IBM and Dell took the third and fourth places, but their market shares did not move much.

IDC puts the storage market at $4.3 billion in the third quarter, so EMC’s share has tremendous value to the company’s topline. Perhaps more important, it is an indication that the company’s large core business is growing again. It does not have other huge operations like IBM, HP, and Dell do, so its fate is more closely tied to storage.

That being the case, EMC’s shareholders may be happy for the first time in a long time.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.