Dell sees best PC quarter in six years

Dell Technologies releases Q4 results seeing revenue up 58 per cent, but still making a loss

Dell Technologies has seen its best quarter for PC shipments in six years after shipping 11 million units, according to CFO Tom Sweet.

On an earnings call, a transcript of which can be found on Seeking Alpha, Sweet said that Dell's Client Solutions Group, which includes PCs and displays, contributed $1.8bn (£1.4bn) to Dell's quarterly revenue - equating to five per cent of the total.

Sweet said, however, that he expects the PC market to continue to struggle in 2017.

"The Client Solutions business had a strong fourth quarter as we further enhanced our portfolio of solutions and continued to focus on profitable growth," he said. "In addition, the overall market was better than expected for calendar Q4.

"We continue to drive market consolidation. According to IDC, we outgrew the market by 9.9 percentage points in calendar fourth quarter and have now gained share year over year for 16 consecutive quarters.

"We are optimistic about the PC market this coming year, but we're still going to be down."

Overall in the quarter, Dell Technologies saw net revenue up 58 per cent year on year to $20bn, but reported an operating loss of $1.7bn.

Despite Dell Technologies being a privately held company it is obliged to publicly report some of its financial information because some of its subsidiaries are listed on stock exchanges.

Following the results announcement subsidiary SecureWorks saw its stock value fall to a record a low since it went public last year.

Alongside the results publication, Dell Technologies announced plans to buy $300m of VMware stock, as part of plans to buy back a total of $1.2bn.

Cost cutting

On the earnings call, Sweet briefly discussed the cost-saving measures that have been under way at Dell since it acquired EMC last year.

Dell has never released any specific details on what these measures entail - only to say that it will do "everything possible to minimise the impact on jobs" - but Bloomberg reported last year that up to 3,000 positions could be axed to save around $1.7bn.

An analyst asked Sweet on the results earning call how the "$2bn of savings you expect to realise within 18 months" are coming along, to which Sweet replied: "I think we are generally on track on the cost synergies to date from what we are executing against.

"I do think, and I alluded to it in my comments, that we are putting some investment back into the business around capacity, around some incremental solution.

"So we'll have to balance that as we go forward relative to where we are in our cost synergy track."