While the company posted upbeat first-quarter financial results, Dell is seeing a slowdown in IT spending.
Dell is expecting IT spending to cool down this summer.
While the Round Rock, Texas, PC vendor posted solid financial numbers May
29, it warned that the slowing U.S. economy will continue to force enterprises
and small businesses to curb their IT spending throughout the 2008 summer.
For the company's 2009 fiscal first quarter, which ended May 2, Dell
reported net income of $784 million, or 38 cents a share, compared with the
$756 million, or 34 cents a share, income the company posted a year ago. Dell's
revenue for the quarter hit $16.1 billion, an increase of 9 percent. Wall
Street analysts had been looking for revenues of $15.7 billion and a net income
of 34 cents a share.
While Dell beat Wall Street expectations, the company did issue a warning in
its quarterly report that IT spending, especially in the United
States, is likely to continue to slow down
through the next three to four months.
The slowdown appears to be more than the seasonal spending downturn that IT
companies go through during the summer months.
Read here about Dell's desktop dilemma.
"The company is seeing conservatism in IT spending in the U.S. particularly
with its global and large customers as well as public, small and medium
business accounts," according to a company statement. "Dell expects the conservatism
to continue through the summer, particularly as many of these customer segments
are seasonally slower."
However, CEO Michael Dell said in a call
with analysts May 29 that while customers are delaying their spending now, they
will stop deferring their purchases at some point as the need for new hardware,
software and services increases.
"At some point, it becomes counterproductive to have tools that are too old,
and so we believe and have seen through any number of cycles that there is kind
of a rebound effect and so we are staying close to these large customers, and
even the customers in the most dire of economic conditions have to upgrade
their productivity tools," said Dell.
Since the credit crunch and the U.S.
housing crisis began late in 2007, research firms from
Forrester
Research to IDC have warned that the slowing U.S.
economy will have an effect on IT spending, especially when it comes to large
hardware purchases, such as PC replacements and new servers.
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