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

To: jim kelley who wrote (46905)	6/9/1998 2:12:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

CPQ has taken a very hard position on sales-in vs sales-out reporting. All of the field metrics are now based on sales-out. This is different than previous practice and some people are confused about what the numbers mean, but I don't think IDC and Dataquest are among the confused. I have not seen the Mercury News article but CPQ has a long standing policy of not taking back inventory. There may have been some special deal because of the ending of price protection in 1Q, anything is possible when the distribution model changes that much. I can't see why they would have done any quid pro quo on laptops, that just adds to the channel inventory problem. It suggests that CPQ may in fact have stuffed the retail channels while it was unstuffing the desktops from the channel retail and desktops are two completely different product groups with different channels so the kind of swap you suggest just couldn't be done. You mentioned that DELL is number 1 in the corporate laptop market this leaves the retail market to CPQ Dell has done a remarkable job in corporate laptops but that hardly means that CPQ quit selling there - I recall that Dell took a point or so from each of the big players. Also CPQ sells different products to commercial accounts, so again it just is not possible to 'move' the products from one segment to the other.