Amit Midha is head of the Asia-Pacific and Japan region for Dell. A native of India educated in the US, he has been with the computer giant for more than 15 years.

He was appointed as the head of Dell China in 2006. Shanghai recently honored him with a Magnolia Gold Award under a program that recognizes the contributions expatriates make to the economic and social development of the city.

He currently serves as an advisory board member of the Binhai District in the city of Tianjin and as a senior consultant to the Chengdu government in Sichuan Province. He is a vice chairman of the China Association of Foreign Invested Enterprises and a senior member of the advisory board of Xiamen University School of Management.

Midha holds a master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Missouri in the US and has an honors degree in Engineering from the SGS Institute of Technology and Science in India. He and his wife have two children.

He talked with Shanghai Daily about information technology development in China and globally.

Q: What growth prospects do you see in information technology in China?

A:  We expect 3 percent to 6 percent annual growth for the China market, but the personal computer segment, especially on the consumer side, may decline. But our business is not just about the consumer; it is driven by four business units. End-user user computing, which is the PC, the tablet and the virtual PC side. We have the data center business, which is enterprise servers, storage and networking. Then we have the services business. The professional services business, support, migration services and modernization services, and last but not least, the software business that is itself a US$1.5 billion business now.

The size of the Chinese market is about US$200 billion.

Q: Founder Michael Dell is taking the company private in a US$25 billion transaction. What impact will that have on Dell’s operations in China?

A: Privatization is expected to be completed by the end of October. Our business strategy is exactly the same. We are acquiring quite aggressively and will acquire more companies and invest on research and development. We want to continue to bring more offerings to the market place.  Michael Dell and his executive team are still the same. We will maintain the same standards going forward.

Q:  Dell has invested heavily in Shanghai and in the city of Chengdu in southwestern China. What is the company’s development strategy?

A:  I think our procurement in China is around US$20 billion a year, making us one of the top exporters in the country. Dell invests in three specific areas in China. The first is research and development. We have several software developments being done right here in Shanghai. We need to leverage the software development capability from Shanghai throughout China.

Secondly, we want to make sure that we continue to bring global products, services and solutions to China, and that is where investment is going to go. Investment is also expanding in smaller cities in China.

Q:  How does China’s performance fare in Dell’s Asia-Pacific and Japan region?

A:  In China, we had a bit of soft performance in the first quarter, but the second quarter performance was good.

We are number one in servers in China, and we just became number one in servers in the entire Asia-Pacific/Japan region. We just became the largest provider of servers and infrastructure in China. More than 80 percent of Internet companies in China, including Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent use our products to run their data centers, networking products, storage and servers.

But indeed, we have more work to do on profitability. The software sector has the highest profit rate of 80 percent, while PC is only 13 percent. About 80 percent of Dell’s revenue comes from business-to-business.

Q:  Does Dell have any plans in the pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai?

A:  We think the Free Trade Zone in Shanghai will be a great step forward for the next generation of China reforms.  We believe that sort of model, once it is proven successful, will be greatly beneficial to companies like Dell. We are still evaluating the situation in order to develop a concrete plan for our activity.

Q: China just released a draft plan to boost the information industry. Will Dell benefit from it?

A: Our business in China is quite large. We believe that any government initiative that helps increase IT use benefits our business.

Q: Cloud computing and big data are major trends. What’s Dell’s strategy in both?

A:  First, we want to make sure we are the equipment provider of choice for those operating cloud. We want to make sure we are giving them the products to provide services in the marketplace. The second strategy related to corporations transforming themselves from being IT groups into being providers of cloud services within their own companies — which is what we call the “private cloud.”

Third, our customers in many cases want public cloud offerings. We are giving them the software to manage it. We recently bought a company called Enstratius to help customers manage multiple cloud providers without any problems. For example, I may be using Amazon cloud or Baidu cloud. I can switch between them. I can take my workload from one cloud to a second and third without any problems.

Q: What is the next wave in the IT industry, both globally and in China?

A: I think IT is becoming the central part of every industry. Globally, the IT industry represents a US$3 trillion market, and we believe it can be a US$5 trillion or US$6 trillion dollar market over 10 years. But there will be a big shift at the same time. Today services are very big, but I think it will change to where customers will look for more modular solutions, more scalable and more secure. IT will change all traditional industries.

Q: How are traditional industries in China responding to these changes?

A: I think they are changing and reacting very quickly. Everyone is thinking of how to become more market oriented.  Investment is quite brisk.