about Meeks: even Kumar stated on CNBC this a.m. that Intel supplies but 3% to 5% of the Server market.
3% to 5% is quite a range. possibly he doesn't know for sure.
but, Dell's strength in Europe is coming from, as Dell says, the corporate sector which is represented principally by Enterprise and laptop sales in Europe.
household desktop units are only now catching on with the newer generation in Europe.
thus, several factors don't jive with Kumar's insistence of tieing Dell in Europe to the weakness in home PC sales there.
at a mutual fund sponsored meeting this a.m. it was pointed out that over the last ten years the S&P 500 has risen 18.5% average per annum, while the EAFE Index(Europe,Australia, Far East) has risen but 7% per annum. yet, from 1980 to 1990, the EAFE well outperformed the S&P 500. Their point to all this was "regression to the mean", that is, for the next ten years the S&P 500 will regress back to it's norm (10% per annum) while the EAFE will regress up toward it's norm (which has been closer to 12% per annum).
the good news about this thinking (which comes, by the way, from fund managers who are well respected - i.e., American Funds) is that its time for Europe and the Far East to shine. So, at least for the American Funds managers, they're shifting their assets to the international scene where they can do so.
Dell, of course, now has strong International presence and is poised to take advantage of this coming growth.
For these managers, who were convincing, technology remains a high priority.
The question I had was that since the U.S. supplies nearly 70% of the world's technological cutting edge products, and since any European and Asia's growth will be dependent on this technology, would that not be positive for U.S. technology companies? This was positively confirmed. |
