“Dell Inc. forecast fiscal first-quarter revenue below Wall Street’s expectations, stoking fears the PC industry has not fully emerged from its downturn and sending the company’s shares more than 4 percent lower,” Poornima Gupta reports for Reuters.
“The world’s No. 3 personal computer maker projected sales would be down 7 percent this quarter from the previous quarter, when it posted revenue of $16 billion. That translates into about $14.9 billion, below the average forecast for roughly $15.2 billion,” Gupta reports. “Dell’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings also came in below Wall Street’s view as strength in its corporate business unit was offset by weakness in the division that caters to public businesses.”
Gupta reports, “PC makers have grappled with slackening demand as mobile devices such as Apple Inc’s iPad erode market share, while a shortage of hard drives after flooding in Thailand crimped supply.”
“Revenue in Dell’s fiscal fourth quarter was up 2 percent at $16 billion, in line with the average analyst estimate of $15.96 billion according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S,” Gupta reports. “The company posted a net income slide of 18 percent to $764 million, or 43 cents a share, for the period, down from $927 million, or 48 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, it earned 51 cents a share, a penny below the 52 cents expected.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Just $764 million profit on $16 billion? That’s a heck of a lot of work for not very much. Woeful, in fact. Seriously, why bother – unless you goal is to doom as many people as possible to inferior personal computing? Bottom line: It looks like making it up in volume isn’t working out very well, huh, Mikey?
Did you know that with each earnings miss, Mikey’s eyes move a millimeter closer together? We predict he’ll go Cyclopsian by Q415.
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Apple now worth fourteen times Dell’s market value – September 20, 2011
Apple now worth thirteen times Dell’s market value – August 26, 2011
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Apple now worth eleven times Dell’s market value – September 23, 2010
Apple now worth ten times Dell’s market value – September 09, 2010
Apple now worth nine times Dell’s market value – June 01, 2010
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Apple now worth sextuple Dell’s market value – October 20, 2009
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Apple could buy Dell outright; Mac-maker has more cash on hand than Dell is worth – October 21, 2008
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Beleaguered Dell: Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders – March 02, 2007
Biting words on Apple come back to haunt Dell – February 10, 2007
Steve Jobs emails Apple team: Michael Dell not the best prognosticator, Apple worth more than Dell – January 16, 2006
Apple now worth more than Dell – January 13, 2006
Sell it all and give the money back to the shareholders. BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
haha. first thing that came to my mind too!
indeed
Perfect!!!!
Hahaha yes! I also Lol’d at the long list of related articles… Apple now worth x times dell’s market share….
There is nothing wrong with a less than 5% profit margin.
Yea, right.
If you’re a supermarket, or some other businesses, that’s pretty good.
Computer maker? Not so good.
I don’t think the separation is between a food retailer and a computer maker, I’d say it’s more about commodity vs non-commodity products.
Dell painted themselves into a corner for year with their strategy of shaving factional cents off the costs of their computers. You get to a point where if there’s nothing else to offer in your product then this strategy will hit a wall.
Combine that with having no control over the customer experience once they get your product out of the box, and you have a recipe for failure.
Dell’s business model is a death spiral.
ug… year = years
factional = fractional…. stupid thumbs get in the way.
Shah Wu was on CNBC today talking about Dell & Apple. He wasn’t too keen on Dell’s future. Conversely, he believes Apple has a lot going for them (surprise!).
The insightful brilliance of these people never ceases to amaze!
In the immortal words of Bruce Willis (as John McLane)….
Welcome to the party pal!
…and now Apple is worth a googolplex more than Dell!
That’s 1 followed by a google of zeros, if ya didn’t know already. Thank you, Gregor Cantor, mathematician of infinities of infinities.
Google is 10 to the 100. Googleplex is 10 to the Google. This is far more than an astonishing size.
To put this in perspective. If you had the number Pi to about 42 significant digits. Which is less than one google of accuracy, you could measure the diameter of the known universe to within the tolerance of one hydrogen atom (the smallest element).
Suffice to say the number google is sufficient to describe anything in the known universe and a the number Googleplex has no real use in this universe other than as a silly number.
When it comes to enumerating, it”s googol. when it comes to eviscerating, it’s Google.
An astonishing size would be Graham’s Number, a number so vast that it is impossible to write it out in digits. Even if each digit occupied one Planck length, there would not be sufficient space in the entire Universe to support such a digital representation.
Knocks a Googleplex into a cocked hat! 🙂
=:~)
If the number is so vast that it can’t be written, then surely it couldn’t be factored. And that means…it is impossible for even one Graham Cracker to exist.
Poof! Nabisco just vanished!
Well it can be written, you just have to use a different notation system like Knuth’s up-arrow notation. Iterating just the first term in Graham’s Number exceeds the universe’s quota of Planck volumes (roughly 10E185)… and there are 63 iterations to go! Poor old Nabisco ain’t got a hope 🙂
=:~)
Kinda puts new meaning onto the phrase “our days are numbered”
It’s strange how only PC assemblers were screwed by the hard drive shortages and Apple seemed to significantly increase production of Macs.
The more we hear about those hard drive shortages being blamed for low output, the more it sounds like a lame excuse to try and conceal the real truth, which is lack of demand for Wintel PCs and strong demand for Macs.
Agreed. The Thailand problem is a convenient scapegoat. If there was demand, we would be seeing escalating Window box prices and articles bemoaning that fact. Much like when back in the 1990s there was a fire at the factory in Japan that made almost all of the epoxy used for packaging chips, and memory prices spiked for a while.
I agree. I have never once seen the shelves empty at Best of Luck (oh, Best Buy) nor heard from anyone that they tried to buy a Windex computer and they were out of stock nor that a store didn’t have what they wanted. We did pay a bit more for some replacement HDs (yes, on Apple boxes as well as Windex boxes – in fact we have had HDs fail recently on two iMacs that were just under two years old). So this HD shortage thing is bogus in my estimation. I am calling shenanigans!
Cyclopsian! LMR*AO!
Versus Apple’s calendar Q411: $46.33 billion in revenue, $13.06 billion in profit.
Margins, Mikey. Margins.
(Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.)
*Rotund
It’s not adding up Moe …. We sold little more than a third of what Apple sold so we shoulda made over a third of what Apple did, Moe – We shoulda made over 4 Billion dollars – BUT something is wrong Moe …..
We only made like, geez Moe we didn’t make much – Don’t tell Mickey about this, OK Moe or at least don’t tell him about how well Apple is doing – Mickey gets mad every time he sees an Apple product Moe, know what I mean Moe, be cool Moe here comes Mickey.
Well, it won’t be long before Apple’s profits are more than Dell’s revenues.
“stoking fears the PC industry has not fully emerged from its downturn”
WTF? Who thought the PC industry was emerging from its downturn? Don’t they look at the data? Without Apple, the PC market has been shrinking.
I’ve been wondering why Microsoft and Dell have been rising the last 2 months. They’re up over 20% in that time. I kept asking people what they thought was driving it, and everyone said it was expectation of Win8!?! Are they nuts?
As I posted recently, the multiple of how many times larger Apple is than Dell will grow rapidly over 20x, as soon as this recent Dell bubble gets popped. It looks to be down 5% in after-hours trading, so I suspect Apple will be 15.5x larger than Dell tomorrow morning and getting wider very quickly.
Those optimist friends of yours must be the same ones who think RIM still has a good chance to make a comeback.
I’ll have some of what they’re drinkin’!
Q415?
My bet is they will never last till 2015.
strength in its corporate business unit was offset by weakness in the division that caters to public businesses
So what are public businesses?
Government at all levels? Read the news and you see how many of those are in extreme budget crises. Not a surprise?
Small businesses? Those most likely to go over to Apple.
It must suck to be him.
BLOODBATH!
Karma can be a real BITA!
😆
I was forced to use a plastic encrusted piece of Dell shit once. Man you could the whole laptop chassis creak as you depressed the keys on the keyboard. Cheap plastic fantastic junk that only a corporate purchasing manager chasing pennies in savings could love. But when you foist that crap on to users, you get output approximating to monkeys bashing on a keyboard trying to churn out a Shakespeare novel but attaining the level of JK Rowlings crapola instead.
Your friggin’ ignorant stupidity appears to be limitless. I’ll bet you roll in your own crap like dog.
Are you riled up? Go ahead puke in your face.
Yes Dell produces crap and I wold never use one. I do however, think that they employ a lot of people and make a little profit to boot. I think those people believe this is a good thing especially in these days of high unemployment.
Man talk about FAT and wasteful spending. Please don’t tell us that its all R&D! LOL
Poor Mikey. If anyone other than Steve Jobs had tried to turn Apple around, he might just have been right!
I’m a Mac fan. I don’t have much, if anything, good to say about Michael Dell’s abilities, but the MacDailyNews Take on this post was beneath MDN. Ad hominem comments and attacks, especially ones that target the subject’s birthright, always diminish the speaker. MDN, I feel the comment about Mr. Dell’s eyes was in extremely poor taste. It went over the line. It’s no different from a bad joke about someone born with a cleft palate. It’s no different from the bad jokes about Jeremy Lin we’ve seen, recently.
I enjoy your quips, but this time, shame on you, MDN.
+1 but I don’t know what you mean by “birthright.”
However, please note that his eyes aren’t really any closer together than most other people’s. It’s an optical illusion brought on by those protruding upper cheek lines and ears, and that unsmiling thin-lipped mouth. He always looks like he’s constipated.
I completely disagree…nothing is beneath MDN.
Can’t argue that with a straight face.
You have to admit Mr. Dell is lucky God gave him a nose…
LOL! The most insightful & empathetic comment I’ve read so far. I’ve become a fan. Michael Dell was a humbug & he still makes crappy products (& I haven’t forgiven him for my Dull Perspiron – an ill-conceived PowerBook replacement – which died a premature death after 2.5 years of light use) so he’ll never have my sympathy.
nothing shocking.
DING DONG THE DELL IS DEAD the wicked Dell is dead
Instead of buying own stock it’s better for them to buy the stock of the company Mr Dell wanted to wind up and distribute the cash and distribute the cash to shareholders. Just wonder how much they can make or would have made instead of buying dud stocks if they would have invested say $5b even 2 years ago. JUST A THOUGHT!!!! Hi Hi Hi
SIDAGTMBTTS!!!
Mikey boy perfectly represents the PC world.
Made by dumb asses for dumb asses (TM)