China's Ministry of Commerce has granted Dell Inc regulatory clearance on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that would enable the company to complete its merger with EMC Corp on Sept. 7, in a $60 billion deal which is seen as the largest tech merger ever, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The government clearance was the only hurdle in the merger deal that EMC shareholders have approved on July 19, the report said.
The company that will be formed by the merger will be named Dell Technologies and will provide a one-stop shop for information technology that will cater to businesses.
Dell expects to become the leading supplier in the emerging cloud computing market, enabling companies to have access to software programs through the Internet.
But Amazon.com Inc.'s Web Services unit, the leader in the market, which is ahead in the cloud market, will give Dell a tough challenge as some analysts doubted the company's ability to compete.
Dell chief executive Michael Dell said in an interview on Monday, Aug. 29, that other competitors are being considered by the company, particularly those firms which sell to companies that want to build their own cloudlike systems. Dell also dismissed claims that most of the corporate computing may shift to third-party systems such as Amazon's.
"I think that's wrong," the Dell executive added, saying that there will be various types of clouds and the market is in its early stages.
"There will be growth in the public clouds and still an enormous amount of on-premise infrastructure, and there will be a lot of service providers outside of the major clouds that are also growing," Dell said.
The report said that the merger is expected to turn the company into the leading vendor in terms of revenue in the global $29 billion market supplying hardware to cloud-computing providers.
According to International Data Corp, Dell and EMC combined gained 18.2 percent of the market in 2015, a market characterized by low-margin hardware.
Dell's acquisition of EMC also covers the federation of several of its subsidiaries that included software development company Pivotal Software Inc., cybersecurity firm RSA Security LLC, and virtualization software vendor VMware Inc.
EMC shareholders are expected to get $24.05 per share in cash, including a newly issued tracking stock as part of the EMC's interest in the VMware business. The shareholders will also receive 0.111 shares of the new tracking stock for each EMC share, based on the number of EMC shares at the close of the transaction.