Franz -
Aware of, yes - but the article you quote is a little misleading -
With sales of nearly $11.95 billion
Dell's web sales were less than $900 million last year. Telephone sales from catalogs and other print media were impressive, nearly $3 billion, but that still leaves nearly $8 billion driven by the sales force. Gateway does virtually all of their $ 7 B in sales via catalog and print media. CPQ claims it does nearly $4 Billion in sales driven by print media, but their indirect distribution makes this hard to confirm, and I have seen estimates as low as $2 B and as high as $6 B for CPQ sales of this type. So an honest ranking might well put GTW first, CPQ second, and Dell third in this particular race. Maybe GTW is in the doghouse with catalogers because of their new store concepts, and CPQ even at $6 B would only have only 16% of revenue from catalogs. Dell will be increasing the share of business that is non-catalog as they expand their enterprise business.
CPQ is certainly not averse to stealing ideas that work (as long as they are public domain!). And if you get to count all your revenue just because some is catalog, CPQ would be way ahead of Dell but way behind IBM, whose $78 B in sales is twice CPQ's. |
