Dell announced profit of $927 million on revenue of $15.7 billion during its fourth-quarter fiscal 2011 earnings call. Its fiscal year 2011 hit a company high.
Dell
enjoyed the largest single-year revenue increase in the company's history
during its fiscal year 2011 fourth quarter, it announced Feb. 15, with the
company's enterprise unit delivering the lion's share of the revenue and profit
growth.
Dell
reported a profit of $927 million during the quarter, on revenue of $15.7
billion. While Dell has recently been moving deeper into the consumer
mobile device market, it is the company's enterprise assets that continue
to secure its bottom line.
Its
profit for all of fiscal year 2011 was $2.6 billion, on revenue of $61.5
billion. Revenue for its large enterprise unit grew by 26 percent sequentially,
and its small and medium business unit saw record profitability, up 12 percent
during the quarter. Its consumer unit, however, was up 11 percent during the
quarter, though down 8 percent year-over-year, which the company
attributed to last year's particularly strong results, following Microsoft's
Windows 7 launch.
"Our
consumer business was modestly profitable at 2 percent," Dell Chief Financial
Officer Brian Gladden said during a call with media and analysts. In a
statement released before the call, Gladden said that Dell is "pleased with the
sustainable operational improvements we've made across the company, including
in our consumer business."
In
November, the media shone a spotlight on Dell's stumbles in the consumer space,
after a company restructuring reportedly led to the
resignation
of Ron Garriques-an executive Dell had hired from Motorola and tasked with
strengthening its consumer image and product line.
Garriques
was on board, for example, during the launch of Dell's first tablet, the
Streak, which featured a 5-inch display-a size that proved unpopular, as
critics generally found it small for a tablet, but large for a smartphone. In
industry parlance, it received a thumbs down for "pocketability."
Dell
recently introduced its Venue and
Venue
Pro smartphones, and said during the call that it will enter the 10-inch
tablet space later this year with a device running Google's tablet-savvy
version of Android, 3.0, or "Honeycomb." The company officially tipped its hand
about the tablet
at
a press event Feb. 8, though it gave no real details beyond the OS and
screen size.
The
company's focus during the last quarter was more intensely on building out its
enterprise portfolio, Dell CEO Michael Dell
said during the call. Expanding its solutions and services portfolio, Dell
recently acquired SecureWorks, a provider of information-security services;
Boomi, a software-as-a-service platform for exchanging data between cloud-based
and on-premises applications; and Insite One, a provider of cloud-based medical
archiving solutions.
Dell
said that the company is "narrowing its focus" on three broad areas that it
"has to win": computing; data center and information management; and services
and all things cloud.
"If
FY11 was largely about getting operationally fit, then FY12 is going to be
about leveraging this division of health and strength to move more aggressively
and accelerate our transformation as a services and solutions company," Dell
said. "Customers are now seeing Dell in a fresh light. We're heading into the
new year with strength and optimism."
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