Dell quarterly revenues down 8% on poor desktop performance Wall Street analysts were expecting a drop off in Dell's business and they won’t be disappointed, with the company reporting revenues down 8 per cent for the second quarter of the year. Dell blamed the drop on poor performance in its PC and mobile divisions, saying that its consumer PC lines were down 22 per cent on the year …
Earlier this month I was in the market for a new laptop for work and Dell was one of the companies I looked at. And frankly, for my laptop choices Dell just sucked as compared to HP and Lenovo in their offerings and pricing. Their laptop choices that I was looking at generally were offered without having a configurable processor choice unless you went with a laptop line that was way above my budget and their warranty plans were very expensive as compared to Lenovo especially. I ended up going with a Thinkpad T530 over any of Dell's laptops because they offered for configuration choices.
We ordered 11 high-end developer workstations over a month ago - and were told they would be delivered the 8th of this month. That has come and gone - and NO ONE at Dell seems to have any idea when they will ship. Status says "in manufacturing". RIGHT....
They used to be on top of things - who knows what's happened inside...
While Dull's crap is not very desirable, I expect that the loss of 100 Million jobs over the past five years has more to do with Dull's decline in sales as HP, Intel, Microsucks and many other PC industry players have learned. Unemployed people and businesses hanging on by a thread during an economic depression headed for 10 years in length, do not have much discretionary income to buy PC based toys/tools.
Consumers aren't their priority -- organizations are. They are completely re-aiming their efforts toward supporting organizations.
Per their earnings report, they have gone from $3.3B in consumer revenue this time last year to $2.6B, while only making 0.5% net income overall off that business. They attribute that to two choices they have made (taken verbatim from their earnings report today)
"Non-participation in low value systems, which impacted revenue in growth markets." Let me translate: we opt not to sell systems at a loss, which is screwing up our ability to be relevant to consumers outside the U.S.
"Shift of spend to alternative mobile devices." We decided, after creating lackluster products like the Streak, that we don't want to compete in this space until we can do something special. But anything we do that's special will be aimed at organizational users, not consumers, because organizations accounted for, this past quarter, all but $14M of our net income.
Dell drove all the margin out of consumer notebooks in a race to the bottom -- and then backed away from the natural consequences. So if you're a consumer -- bad news for ye. If you're an organization, expect more choice from Dell -- because they can make money from your purchases.
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