14 DAY TRIAL // Dell's chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell announced the company is currently elaborating a plan of repurchasing stock shares worth $10 million. This initiative is not a novelty among the company, since the executives already started a program for taking back the company shares, but it was suspended back in August 2006, as Dell had to file a backlog of earnings report with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"Dell is committed to a long-term share repurchase program as part of an overall capital allocation plan that supports growth and also returns value to shareholders", Dell said in a statement. Chief Financial Officer Don Carty also mentioned that there is no strictly definite timeframe for the buyback, but the company currently has $15 billion in the treasury expecting another $1 billion from quarterly profits. In October, Dell had about 2.24 billion shares outstanding and the shareholders and investors ruled a proposal regarding executive stock ownership guidelines.
The board of directors also decided that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP would be the company's independent auditor during the next fiscal year. Dell had some issues with their October restatements, that were showing $92 million reduced profits for fiscal years 2003 through 2006, as well as the first quarter of fiscal 2007. The wrong figures were the result of misleading accounting, and an internal investigation revealed that they have tampered with the results and misled auditors for performance achievements.
Recent reports show that the company had a 27 percent boost in the overseas quarterly earnings, due to Dell's intensive exporting notebooks, combined with falling prices for memory chips and other components that are used in the company's manufacturing units. On the United States market, the company had a slight 6 percent drop in sales and orders because of the strong competition from Hewlet-Packard, Acer and Lenovo.