Dell Q3 sales slide 11 per cent worldwide

Vendor giant sees decreases in a range of categories and countries

Dell saw its global revenues decline 11 per cent in Q3 to $13.7bn (£8.6bn) from the same quarter a year ago, according to latest figures.

The vendor pointed the finger at a contraction in desktop and mobile sales but hastened to underline its areas of strength, including server and networking revenue, enterprise solutions and services, and services generally.

"Server and networking revenue for the quarter grew 11 per cent. Dell was the only top-three server provider to have positive unit growth in the quarter," the vendor said in its announcement.

"Dell Enterprise Solutions and Services (ES&S) revenue grew three per cent year over year to $4.8bn. The company year to date is four per cent ahead of last year's ES&S revenue at $14.2bn, accounting for more than 50 per cent of the company's gross margin thus far this year. The ES&S business is on an annual run-rate approaching $20bn."

Dell went on to say that its server sales growth was driven by the new 12th generation line, "hyper-scale" infrastructure solutions, and increasing adoption of cloud by customers.

"Differentiated intellectual property and solutions have resulted in solid growth in this business," it said.

Dell Services, meanwhile, was seeing gross margin percentages continuing to improve quarter by quarter. Support, deployment and security services were the highlights, the vendor added.

The vendor's revenues from large enterprise customers, the public sector, SMBs and consumer segments as a whole were all down. Consumer revenue collapsed 23 per cent to $2.5bn in the quarter, bleeding about $349m from the global giant's coffers.

The SMB business only saw a one per cent decline, and still made the company $349m in Q3. EMEA sales fell 15 per cent, and revenue from the Americas was down nine per cent.

The Asia-Pacific and Japan saw a decline of 11 per cent in revenue terms.

Dell blamed "the challenging global macro-economic environment", which it sees continuing in Q4. "The company expects sequential revenue growth of two to five per cent [in Q4]," it said. "[But] the company is committed to its end-to-end solutions strategy and creating value over the long term."