Dell chairman Michael Dell has defended the vendor’s reaction to the recent ‘flaming batteries’ fiasco by claiming its widespread recall will be appreciated.
Dell said: “People tend to focus too much on what happened in the past 24 hours. I prefer to look at the past 24 years. There are a number of things a company might do in this situation: run and hide, wait for the regulators, or claim it’s not a problem. We’ve exercised an abundance of caution. Beyond all the hysteria, we’re doing the right thing for our customers and they’ll appreciate it in the long run.”
His comments were made to the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce last week during a tour of Asia. They come as analyst Gartner warned the IT industry that the recall should act as a catalyst for companies to refresh back-up and contingency plans.
Dell was also bullish about his firm’s ability to overcome the 51 per cent plunge in profits for its second quarter results, announced last week.
“There have been many challenges, over the years, but come and see us in a couple of quarters,” he said.
As reported by CRN Online last week, Dell recently had to recall 4.1 million notebook batteries in the single largest safety related product recall in US history. More than 1.4 million of those were sold outside the US. For months prior to the recall, there were an increasing number of reports of the Sony manufactured batteries overheating and causing Dell notebooks to burst into flames. The recalled notebooks, which include Precision, Latitude and Inspiron and XPS models, accounted for 18 per cent of the 22 million notebooks Dell sold between April 2004 and July 2006. The cost to Dell and Sony is expected to run into hundreds of millions of pounds. For most businesses and consumers, it means waiting two to four weeks for replacement batteries.
Gartner issued a warning note to companies last week, saying: “If you use other manufacturers’ notebooks, employ this event as a fire drill that will enable you to understand how effectively your processes might handle such a recall.
“The scale of this recall reinforces the importance of maintaining detailed and up-to-date asset-tracking information. While the probability of encountering a problematic battery is about one in a million, the risk cannot be ignored. Since Dell has stated that users will not initially receive replacement batteries for two to four weeks, Gartner advises companies to work at resolving this problem.”
>> Further reading:
Dell recalls 'fire risk' laptop batteries
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