And here's where many 820's went...
interactive.wsj.com
Revenue from servers, storage products, workstations and notebook PCs rose to 48% of total system sales, Dell said, up from 39% in the year-earlier quarter.
May 11, 2000
Dell Beats 1st-Quarter Estimates,
Showing Strength in Server Sales
An INTERACTIVE JOURNAL News Roundup
ROUND ROCK, Texas -- Dell Computer Corp. posted a 21% increase in first-quarter earnings, beating Wall Street's expectations as it shifted its focus to Internet servers and other more-profitable products.
Reporting after the close of regular stock-market trading Thursday, Dell posted net income of $525 million, or 19 cent a diluted share, for the fiscal quarter ending April 28. That compares with earnings of $434 million, or 16 a share, a year earlier. Its revenue rose 31% to $7.28 billion from $5.54 billion.
Analysts expected Dell to post latest-quarter earnings of 16 cents a share for the quarter on revenue of $7.1 billion, according to First Call/Thomson Financial.
At 4 p.m. Thursday, Dell shares were down 25 cents to $44.6875 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares climbed substantially in after-hours trading , reaching $47.25, according to Reuters Instinet, up 5.7% from their regular-session close.
Dell's chief financial officer, James Schneider, stood by his previous sales-growth forecasts for the company. "Our expectations for the rest of the year are unchanged -- revenue will be in the low-30% range," Mr. Schneider. "We're still holding to that."
He said the company managed to beat the earnings projections primarily because of a shift toward more profitable business lines in the first quarter and because of lower-than-anticipated component costs.
Revenue from servers, storage products, workstations and notebook PCs rose to 48% of total system sales, Dell said, up from 39% in the year-earlier quarter.
Last month, Dell officials announced a plan to make Internet servers their top priority, a bid to overcome slower growth in their PC business.
"The fundamental competitive advantages of our customer-focused direct business model are widening," said Michael S. Dell, chairman and chief executive, in a prepared statement. "That's particularly true in the server and storage products at the heart of the Internet infrastructure."
Dell's shift to Internet servers follows similar strategies at International Business Machines Corp. , Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. |
