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Dell posts record profit but consumer sales slide

By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 22 Feb 2012 at 11:06

Dell's revenue for the past year has held steady, propped up by enterprise clients as profits from consumer sales fell.

For the full year, Dell's revenue was $62 billion, up 1% from last year, while profit was up 27% to a record $4bn.

Much of that success was down to its focus on enterprise. Sales jumped 58% for networking and 21% for storage, but consumer profits fell dramatically, especially in the US.

Consumer product sales were down 2% globally, but profit nearly halved to $39m from $69m the year before.

"Revenue weakness was largely concentrated in the United States, while revenue from non-US countries grew 10%," Dell said.

Dell pinned some of its consumer sales woes on the ongoing hard disk shortage.

“We just didn’t get the mix of drives that we wanted, and it really forced us to sell less configured lower-end systems and prevented us from accessing higher-margin, more highly configured systems,” chief financial officer Brian Gladden said, according to a report in the New York Times.

One success in the consumer market was its XPS line; with sales leaping 103%, the XPS now makes up nearly one in five Dell consumer notebooks sold.

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User comments

Not what the BBC says...

This story is a load of old cobblers. Dell's profits fell in the last quarter, causing share prices to fall, according to the BBC. Given this site's record on journalistic accuracy, I think I'll believe the BBC version:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17122014

By SwissMac on 22 Feb 2012

Same revenue, 25% profit increase

Businesses clearly don't hunt for bargains like people do.
There's your capitalist "efficiency" debunked right there :P

By dubiou on 22 Feb 2012

Hi @SwissMac,

We took the full year numbers, while the BBC looked at quarterly. Both sets of numbers are released at the same time. Over the past three months, Dell's sales fell; over the year, they were about flat.

Nicole Kobie
News Editor

By Nicole_Kobie on 22 Feb 2012

Not comparing like with like

@SwissMac if you read carefully the two stories are different. The one on this page quotes yearly results, while on the BBC it refers only to the last quarter.

By dwlhot on 22 Feb 2012

News means latest, not most favourable.

You're right the BBC figures are for the last quarter, but that shows the direction the company is going in which is why the share price fell 6% on the news. In comparison, HP lost 1% today, MS -0.1%, Google -0.6%. For comparison, the NASDAQ as a whole went down just -0.2% while Apple are varying between -0.1% and zero loss.

Dell's one of the companies I follow and in the tech sector they are suffering badly. Your story makes it sound like they are thriving! But then, they are a long standing and major advertiser in PCPro...

By SwissMac on 22 Feb 2012

have a day off SwissMac

If all you can do is criticise then dont read the story, simple! Really anoys me that PCPro put a lot of work into the publication but yet you cant resisit being a smart a**e. Go and create your own publication if you think you know it all! You could call it "SwissTroll Knows Best"

By HolisticLA on 23 Feb 2012

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