Jackie....PC pricing is competitive.. period....what happened in January...happened in January last year too...(ie...unstuffing of channel, slower sales due to waiting for new upgrades...for entire industry)....Dell performed well during the times others were unstuffing (last year)
Remember, this January's (industry) weakness was captured in Dell's last quarter...This quarter, Dell has 2 months of Pentium III sales included...traditionally, Dell has seen a bump when new Intel chips are launched...also, Y2K should add a lift...and y-o-y, Dell is not fighting a particularly strong Q1 '98..so results should be good...Storage kicking in a little too, as well (not available last year at this time..)
MD said that Dell entered this quarter with the most competitive bid wins (% basis) in their history...Meredith said they expected a "very robust" '99....That hardly sounds like the stuff of calamities to me...
Although I think every needs to pay heed, the PC industry press is manic-depressive...when things tick down, "the world is ending", when things tick up, "everything's beautiful"...my goodness, how soon have we gone from cloudless skies to horrible storms here...
Financial press tries to sell newspapers and on-line ads...Don't get too wrapped up in the headlines....
We'll see how long the David Walter's hang around here..most (doomdayers) have left already..They called the parabolic spike, and got it....if Dell was truly tanking, it would have got absolutely hammered the last couple days...it did not....Everyone who wanted to dump is already out of this stock...the slightest bit of good news will turn it north again...Wednesday' news will probably pop it back into a 85-87 trading range until the next earnings run.... |
