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To: Aitch who wrote (67028)	8/26/1999 6:57:00 PM
From: Elwood P. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Thursday August 26 6:38 PM ET - Dell Sees No End To Strong Growth By Jeff Franks AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Everyone keeps waiting for Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq:DELL - news) to stumble, but executives at the fast- rising direct sales king said this week they expect to continue growing the company at astronomical rates. In presentations at the Dell DirectConnect conference for major customers, they gave no firm numbers but said there was no reason to believe that the pace of sales growth -- more than 40 percent the past two quarters -- would flag even as their share of the market gets bigger and bigger. Founder and chairman Michael Dell told reporters that Dell would continue to ''grow at multiples to the market'' and that strong growth was sustainable until the company had a much larger piece of the global personal computer pie. ''We have just 10 percent of the global market,'' he said. ''I don't think this will be an issue for us until we get to 25 percent.'' ''At this point, we haven't seen share position as an inhibitor to growth,'' said Dell senior vice president Ro Parra. In fact, he said, just the opposite was occurring because greater marketshare creates its own sales momentum. Recent figures from research firm Dataquest showed that Dell had 16.4 percent of the U.S. marketplace, just behind troubled industry leader Compaq Computer Corp (NYSE:CPQ - news), but trailed Compaq worldwide by a margin of 13.8 percent to 10.2 percent. Dell executives said their firm was now the top seller to governments and small businesses and was closing the gap with Compaq in corporate and consumer sales. ''We're very bullish,'' said Paul Bell, general manager of Dell's consumer and small business consumer PC business. ''The industry is so fragmented that we can continue growing at accelerated rates until you get to share levels that are considered normal for (industry) leaders.'' The Internet is the key to Dell's growth strategy. The message the company hammered home to customers was that ''E- commerce'' was the future and no one could help them do it better than Dell, which has the world's top E-commerce site. Dell said the company's Internet sales are now $30 million a day, far more than that of any other firm. Michael Dell said that represents 40 percent of the company's revenues and is expected to go much higher. ''It's clearly going to go to 60 or 70 percent in the not too distant future,'' he said. In a speech, he showed how Dell is using the Internet to not only sell computers, but also give customer support and help parts suppliers provide timely inventory by allowing them into Dell databases to see how quickly products are flowing out of the company's assembly plants. During the conference, the company said it would begin equipping computers with a button that customers could push to gain instant Internet access to a new level of support services that could diagnose and in some cases fix computer problems remotely. In addition, Dell gave customers a glimpse of a small, stylish computer it will begin offering in the fall for that part of the market that Dell called the ''cool'' consumer. The new computer, being developed under the code name ''Webster,'' is a departure for Dell which has never been known for its product innovation or concern for style, and a signal of its resolve to increase its consumer PC sales. Currently, consumer sales make up about 15 percent of Dell revenues. Dell executives said plans were in the works to begin offering customers the option to select different shapes and colors for their computers, a la Apple Computer's highly successful iMac. ''Industrial design and look and feel are getting more interesting,'' said Bell.