Dell among Top 10 PC vendors in China for the first time in Q4.
Screw Cowen look what Dell & Microsoft are doing just in Asia.
MM:
These guys don't get it,either that or they get it but there is no money in it for them to stay the course, they need to shake'em up a bit every couple of months to generate business and get their name in the press.
Now while analysts are screwing around with their upgrade/downgrade business the 'boys' are doing their thing as evidenced by the followings news items.
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Source:SCMP
Tuesday, March 9, 1999
BUSINESS
Direct approach sees Dell close in on leaders
New focus: Dell Asia-Pacific president John Legere says China's PC market soon will be bigger than Japan's.
ERIC LAI
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For so long a small-time player in the mainland's burgeoning personal computer market, Dell Computer is finally catching up.
The United States PC maker broke into the top 10 among PC vendors in the mainland for the first time in the fourth quarter of last year, coming in eighth, International Data Corp said.
Sales of Dell computers in the mainland grew 100 per cent in the fourth quarter from the third. If Dell can sustain that pace of growth, it will end this year with PC sales of more than US$100 million in the mainland.
Dell attributes the sales boom to the belated implementation of its vaunted direct-sales model in the mainland last August.
"Until we began selling direct, we weren't Dell yet," John Legere, president of Dell Asia-Pacific, said.
A relative latecomer to Asia, Dell had posted impressive sales growth rates under previous president Phil Kelly's aggressive expansion. In 1997, sales in Asia, including Japan, grew 76 per cent to $840 million.
Though Dell was battling IBM for second place among PC vendors worldwide, the company remained a second-tier player in Asia early last year. It ranked 11th among PC vendors in the mainland, where it was sputtering slowly towards introducing a direct-sales model.
Mr Legere was in New Jersey running AT&T's 10,500-employee outsourcing and systems integration division when he got a call from Dell last June. At age 40, Mr Legere had been the youngest executive at his level in AT&T history when he was appointed president and chief executive of AT&T's Hong Kong Asia-Pacific division in 1994.
So why did he come back to the SAR and take over Dell's operations when it was then only a 10th of the size of AT&T in terms of the number of employees?
"I had just spent 18 years at a company which had an annual growth rate of 1 per cent," he said.
He joined a Dell Asia operation that was far from in disarray.
"Phil [Kelly] had set up a good team, good processes, good infrastructure. All I've done is focus the strategy."
There were two components to this strategy, Mr Legere said. First, he improved Dell's internal processes. PCs now shipped faster and failed less often, and excess inventory had been reduced.
Second, he focused on two markets: the mainland, which he predicted would be bigger than Japan in two years; and Australia, where Dell now ranked in the top four.
In mature markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong, Mr Legere said he was pushing Dell hard into the high-end consumer market. In Taiwan and Korea, he was content to play it smart.
"Don't try to take the Korean market from Samsung," he said. "Don't try to fight Twinhead in Taiwan."
A baseball fan, Mr Legere is swinging for the fences in the tradition of Mark McGwire and hoping for a home run with the launch of direct sales in the mainland. Dell opened its first assembly plant in Xiamen in February last year. This allowed Dell, despite the mainland's nightmarish transport infrastructure, to ship its PCs from Xiamen to customers in five to seven days.
Dell PCs now can be bought in nearly 100 of the mainland's biggest cities via the telephone, the Internet or from a Dell salesman, which is still the most common method of sales. Cutting out the middleman enables Dell to offer lower prices and keep higher profit margins.
Last year, Dell sold slightly more than $1 billion worth of computers in Asia. While sales growth slowed from the year before, Dell still outperformed the overall PC market, which shrank last year.
Mr Legere's goal is for Dell to reach $3 billion in sales in 2000. He will have no trouble producing the PCs - Dell's 135,000-square-foot Xiamen plant is only at a quarter of its capacity.
Dell begins exporting PCs from Xiamen to Hong Kong for the first time this week. Other markets served by Dell's Malaysian plant could soon follow.
"If we can move up from seventh to fifth in Asia, get some share in China and get the engine cranking, then we'll have both scale and momentum," said Mr Legere.
technologypost.com
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Ref:Microsoft
Tuesday, March 9, 1999
BUSINESS
HKT, Microsoft services should be ready 'in months'
Updated at 8.14pm:
Hongkong Telecom and Microsoft will be ready to launch their new internet multi-media services within months, it was revealed on Tuesday.
The firms aim to provide the Internet, films and television, e-mail, games and software to users at home via television or personal computer.......
technologypost.com
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