14 DAY TRIAL // The financial evolutions of IT companies during the past quarter are proving to be somewhat baffling, as those set to suffer flourished and others took hits in their stead.
After seeing that both Seagate and Western Digital do more than fine despite the so-called HDD crisis, Lenovo is turning out to be the only so-called stabilizing factor. At least it behaved as expected, growing some more.
Now we get to look at another dreary set of numbers, courtesy of Dell, whose investors probably aren't overly relaxed at the moment.
Back in the fourth quarter of 2011, the company managed to score strong sales on the enterprise front, and that turned out to be what it needed in order to offset a drop in other areas.
Now, not only did personal computer sales go down, but so did the enterprise sector.
Granted, Dell made it a point of saying that it was trying to put less emphasis on home sales in favor of end-to-end IT.
Nevertheless, the consumer group going down by 12% was somewhat painful and, though enterprise sales increased 2%, the Large Enterprise group registered a 3% decline.
"We continued to shift the mix of our business during a challenging environment," said Brian Gladden, Dell chief financial officer.
"Our enterprise solutions and services businesses now account for 50 percent of our gross margin, and we'll continue to make the necessary investments to maintain our progress."
Dell has been buying companies left and right, like security developers, modernization application developer Clerity and cloud expert Wyse, but it hasn't had time to reap the benefits yet.
Overall, revenues dropped to $14.4 billion (11.37 billion Euro) and profits ended up at $635 million (502.09 million Euro), 33% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2011.
"We're committed to continuing our strategy to re-shape Dell's business as an end-to-end IT provider," said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO. "We saw continued progress in our first quarter with the innovative IT solutions we're providing – notably our latest Dell servers, storage, networking and services that deliver customers enhanced productivity."