Stock Bull - My apologies for interfering with your direct question to Mohan and his reply, but perhaps I can give some form of perspective to allay your concern a bit more.
Although I am not an investor in either MSFT or INTC, I always read their reports to judge the impact on Dell, which is my biggest investment at this time. As many posters have pointed out both these companies reported excellent earnings and therefore so should Dell. It is, perhaps, a bit more illuminating to consider what is behind the optimism. So here is a precis of the MSFT report....the report itself can be found at
microsoft.com
The 1st para, of course details their spectacular results, the 2nd,
3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th paras. are what these comments are snipped from....
"Strong growth in PC shipments fueled broad demand for our products including Microsoft® Windows NT® Server and Windows NT Workstation, server applications, and Office 97," Corporate customers are choosing the Microsoft platform,"noted Bob Muglia, senior vice president, applications and tools division at Microsoft.
"Microsoft Office, SQL ServerTM and Exchange all reached new highs this quarter, with shipments of all server applications nearly doubling in the past year."
"Strong sales of the Windows NT Server family of products (Windows NT
Server; Windows NT Server, Terminal Server Edition; and Windows NT
Server, Enterprise Edition)showcased customer demand for multipurpose
capabilities:"
MSFT's report strongly implies that their spectacular earnings were due primarily to corporate sales. Keep in mind that MSFT blew out estimates by over 20% (0.73 vs 0.59) and that constitutes a revenue excess of 1 Billion Dollars (which was somehow missed by the highly paid analysts tasked to watch them closely - <BG>). Now Dell is primarily in the business of selling to corporate businesses and is a favorite client of MSFT.
Secondly, let's take INTC. INTC specifically stated that the demand for the Celeron (low-priced chips) was less than they expected while the demand for the Pentium IIs was much higher - to the extent that they actually switched a production line of Celerons over to Pentiums. This change would have cost them Millions, and would not have been undertaken lightly since the cost of the switchover would have to be exceeded by NET profits on the Pentiums for it to make any sense.
Finally look at the IDC and Dataquest reports and their estimates of growth and sales for Dell.
Looking at all these, I feel fairly confident that there will be no revenue shortfall in this quarter.... Just my opinion, of course.....<BG>
Have a good day.... |
