Hi Kemble, FYI! I know this news was posted, but here is the article from Austin. :)Leigh
austin360.com
austin360.com
business/tech Wednesday, February 16
Dell's senior VP replaces European head
By Jerry Mahoney
American-Statesman Staff
Wednesday, February 16, 2000
For the second time in seven months, Dell Computer Corp. has replaced the head of its European operations, transferring Senior Vice President Paul Bell to London to jump-start disappointing sales.
Bell, 40, replaces John Legere, who resigned suddenly Monday. Legere was named president of Dell Europe only last July, after 12 months as senior vice president in charge of Dell's Asia-Pacific business.
Legere, 42, left Dell to be chief executive of Asia Global Crossing, a joint venture with Microsoft and Softbank Corp., to build a fiber-optic network in the Asia-Pacific region.
"This move has nothing to do with my opinion of Dell or Dell's opinion of me or of the European business," Legere said Tuesday in response to questions sent by e-mail. "I just suddenly resigned to take up this great opportunity leading Asia Global Crossing."
The new job suggests Legere left Dell for a good career move. But PC industry analyst Roger Kay said he may have thought it was time to go for other reasons as well.
"He probably was getting a lot of heat from inside Dell," said Kay, vice president of International Data Corp.'s PC research unit. "And he wasn't having that much fun."
Dell's business in Europe grew 17.2 percent last year, slipping markedly from the 60 percent rate of the year before.
Dell executives have been troubled by slowing growth in the world's second-largest PC market since last spring. The worries were compounded last week when the company reported that fourth-quarter revenue grew by only 7.1 percent in Europe from a year earlier. That was Dell's poorest performance in Europe, and appeared especially anemic compared with a surge of 40 percent between the fourth quarters of 1998 and 1997.
Legere was transfered to Europe to replace Jan Gesmar-Larsen, who took a personal leave last summer. That move was foreshadowed in April, when Chief Executive Michael Dell expressed disappointment with the 29 percent increase in sales during a conference call with Wall Street analysts.
But the European slide continued. Year-over-year revenue grew 25 percent during the second quarter, 23 percent in the third and 7.1 percent in the fourth quarter.
The European assignment -- running a $6 billion business with 10,000 employees -- is both a daunting challenge and a major opportunity for Bell, whose record of fast growth has made him one of Dell's rising stars. As senior vice president for the consumer and small-business group in the Americas, Bell has led the company's vigorous expansion in those segments.
With sales of $8 billion last year, the consumer and small-business operation accounted for nearly one-third of Dell's revenue. Most of that comes from businesses, where Dell is No. 1 in the U.S. market.
Dell said fourth-quarter shipments of Inspiron notebooks and Dimension desktop PCs increased 64 percent from the same quarter in 1998. As the senior manager over both those products and the Americas, Bell oversaw the transfer of the company's Dimension PC operations to a campus in Nashville, Tenn.
In addition, he has been the global manager of Dell's online business, which now accounts for half of Dell's sales.
But it is Bell's role in ramping up the consumer and small-business sales that vice chairman Kevin Rollins emphasized Tuesday.
"That portion of our business in the Americas is nearly five times its size just 2 1/2 years ago, when we stepped up our pursuit of home-PC and small-business customers," he said in a statement.
Staff writer John Pletz contributed to this report. You may contact Jerry Mahoney at jmahoney@statesman.com or 445-3642. |
