14 DAY TRIAL // Dell has recently announced its financial results for the second fiscal quarter and the news are looking good as the company reported higher than usual revenue and profits because of favorable market trends which were coupled with high average selling prices and low costs for all kinds of hardware parts.
In the middle of a restructuring process started in January, the company reported a net income of over $700 million for the just ended quarter compared with only $502 million for the same period last year, while revenues went way high from $14.09 billion a year ago to $14.8 billion. As market trends were very favorable, with high selling prices for both desktop and laptop computer systems and lower acquisition prices for the needed hardware components, Dell was one of the computer manufacturing companies which capitalized on the existing situation. Apart from the consumer-oriented products, Dell also encountered a high demand of server systems and additional storage products and solutions which increased from $1.4 billion to $1.6 billion and from $500 million to $600 million respectively.
"While our results demonstrate we've made progress against our goals, we are still in the early stages of transforming our company's structure, costs, and operations," Michael Dell said in a statement and he was cited by the news site informationweek. According to the Gartner marketing research firm and Charles Smulders, Dell is gaining more ground on the server market while losing some of its foothold on the notebook and desktop markets which are more consumer oriented. Overall Gartner's financial analyst is not very optimistic when talking about Dell's financial situation as the company is yet to finish its restructuring plan started when Michael Dell returned. "I wouldn't take too much direction from these numbers," Charles Smulders said. "They are in a transformation period, so making a judgment call now is very difficult."
Apart from the good financial news there are a number of problems that continue to plague Dell, like an entire host of very unhappy clients because of its "dusty" multi colored laptops and an already underway investigation started by the Securities and Exchange Commission over Dell's accounting books and practices. Dell's founder Michael Dell returned to his former chief executive officer post in January after the former executive Kevin Rollins quit the company following a long period of declining sales, customer satisfaction and market position losing to the competing company HP which is currently the first computer systems manufacturer and provider in the world.