Michael Dell Says Rivals Should Not Exit PC Business

Post by Sharat | October 18, 2011 | Dell Computers, Dell News | Comment

Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Australia says that there are some real benefits to staying in the PC business, comments which can be construed as being a thinly veiled dig at the announcement of rival HP, that it was considering spinning off its PC business.

Mr. Dell made his comments at the Oracle Open World conference which took place in October, where he told an audience that the PC business continued to be worth billions of units, and that the company was very happy to remain in the segment.

“Dell does shiny boxes, and we do them very well,” he said. Although he also reiterated that “Dell is not a PC company”, but an end-to-end solutions provider.

Mr. Dell said that exiting the PC business was likely to result in problems in other areas of operation, with the Dell chief noting that 95 per cent of all disk drives are for PC’s, with only 5 per cent required for storage and servers, thus were HP to exit the PC business, it would lose its scale and purchasing power in the components segments, which would mean result in higher end product costs for enterprise customers.

Mr. Dell’s warnings however may prove unnecessary, with the plans to spin of the PC unit currently in limbo, after previous HP chief executive by Léo Apotheker, under whose leadership the plan was announced was sacked, and replaced by former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman.

Ms. Whitman has not yet arrived at a decision, and says she will consider the matter until the end of the month, before making it, with no indication that she is as keen as her predecessor to exit the space altogether.