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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jim kelley who wrote (36266)	4/1/1998 2:47:00 PM
From: D. Swiss	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Jim, I wasn't able to access the CPQ report? Drew

To: jim kelley who wrote (36266)	4/1/1998 11:13:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Good article. I had a chance to discuss this with a CPQ executive, he said it was pretty accurate with two exceptions - the sales organization had assured EP that they could move the inventory, and 'stuffing the channel' has been a routine end of quarter activity at CPQ for 10 years, especially at year end, and although they have occasionally had some backups there had never been a really serious problem. So it was 'business as usual' going into 1Q98. He doubted that Mason intentionally mislead the analysts, but a combination of factors made the trusty old channel stuffing strategy blow up. He claimed that the numbers looked really bad in early January and at first the sales team thought there was something wrong with the reporting because of the changes CPQ had been making in the channel for ODM. By February the handwriting was on the wall but still they thought that aggressive price action could pull it out. He also said that IBM has had a big impact on several areas of the business, apparently they were also dumping inventory, especially servers, but because of their distribution methods few people in the press or analyst camp figured it out. Pretty grim for CPQ. Since I have an interest in both CPQ and Dell it will be interesting to see if Dell can capitalize on current conditions, it would be nice to see Something going up...