AUSTIN, Texas >> The founder and CEO of Dell Inc. said he’s been pleased with the state of his company since it went private last fall, ending its 25-year run as a publicly traded business.

In an interview with the Austin American-Statesman, Michael Dell spoke about his company, competitors, layoffs and goals.

Since going private, the computer company has downsized its number of employees, but hasn’t said how many layoffs there have been. It’s still the largest private employer in the Austin area, with about 14,000 workers in central Texas. About 100,000 people work for Dell Inc. around the world.

Dell said that they have been hiring workers in some departments, like sales, but letting employees leave through a voluntary separation program in other areas “where you need less people.”

“And so we’re just doing the normal things,” he said. “There’s nothing significantly different from what we’ve been doing in the past.”

The company has been doing well since it went private, with shares in servers and networking increasing and the number of PC unit shipments also increasing, Dell said. The business has been able to accomplish all of the “things that we talked about doing,” including investing in research and development and growing its software and services business.

One of the company’s main competitors, Hewlett-Packard Co., recently announced that it was dividing into two companies, which Dell said wasn’t “something we would have done.”