re R&D budgets
Tony,
You said, "With what, Dell's pathetic 1.5% R&D budget? Maybe they can get their new big brother IBM to go down the street and pick a fight with EMC. Dell has a marvelous business model for PC sales and distribution, JIT, dock to stock, whatever, but they are nobody to challenge a market leader on a technology basis."
May I direct your attention to:
127.0.0.1:3456/SI/~wsapi/investor/reply-8163456
Message 8178052
I have no position in either IBM or EMC (unfortunately), though I do own some DELL. However, I think that a prudent EMC shareholder would at least examine some of the implications of a DELL/IBM alliance. Tom Meredith has an excellent record for delivering on his statements; he is not a cheerleader yelling "my team's going to beat your team"--take him lightly at your own risk.
Here is DELL's annual report for 1998 (thru FEB 98)
dell.com.
The data shows net revenue (page 2) to be $12,327MM, and R&D (page 3) to be 1.6%, which works out to about $197,000,000 for R&D. Only 1.6% of net revenue, true, but still perhaps more than one might expect for a simple box-maker, and hardly "pathetic".
... here is IBM's R&D data, showing $4,877MM for 1997:
ibm.com
...and here is EMC's 1997 data, showing R&D expenses of $220,884,000 on revenues of $2,937,860,000:
emc.com
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to pick a fight. JMHO that a shareholder would wish to consider such information objectively.... after all, the last I heard, IBM did have some minor interest in data storage and access.
regards, jbn3. |
