Operations

Chairman and CEO Michael Dell and CFO Brian Gladden
Discuss Dell Q3 Fiscal Year 2009 Performance

Dell announced third-quarter fiscal-year 2009 financial results on Nov. 20.  Michael Dell, chairman and CEO, and Brian Gladden, discuss the results and the company’s outlook. You may also listen to the earnings conference call and view the earnings presentation here.
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You had strong Q3 operating results in a challenging environment. What do you see as the highlights?
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Brian Gladden: I like how we achieved the results. We’ve got more to do, but showed discipline in further improving competitiveness and capturing profitable growth, while being more focused than ever on what customers need. We produced our best operating income in dollar terms in 11 quarters. Dell’s business model lets us see trends in the economy and IT and react to them faster. That was evident in our improved profitability: earnings per share increased 9 percent to 37 cents. Expenses were down to 12.1 percent of revenue—and down more than $200 million from Q3 last year. We remain determined to drive balanced performance in growth and profitability over time.
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What’s the strategic approach behind those results?
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Michael Dell: First, we’re focusing on expense management and regaining cost leadership. We made progress in the quarter on operating expenses and product costs consistent with the plan we outlined in April. We are on a path that will yield significant overall cost savings—both an advantaged cost structure in our direct business, which is 75 percent of our revenue, and a competitive structure in our channel business. Enhanced efficiency in our model is allowing us to deliver value for our customers and improved profitability for Dell.
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Second, we’re expanding our presence in the enterprise. Current conditions are driving more customers to look for great technology that’s cost effective. That’s our core strength. In addition, CIOs are more focused on driving IT productivity and simplification, and they like the idea that they can simplify and save money. We are in a great position to help them with virtualization and remote infrastructure management, and the enhancements we’re making to our enterprise solutions portfolio are addressing these needs.
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Third, progress in Global Consumer has been fueled by a first wave of product innovation and cost-structure improvements. As these enhancements roll to our small-and-medium-business and emerging-country customers, we have a big, ongoing opportunity to grow our direct business as well as our value-added reseller and retail channels.
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How were you able to lower operating expenses so much in the quarter?
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BG: By continuing to take unnecessary costs out of our operations and products, something we’ve been doing for several quarters. For example, since the second quarter of last year we reduced global employment by close to 11,600, net of acquisitions. We’re on track to achieve our goal of $3 billion in annualized cost reductions by 2011.
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What was different about cash flow in Q3 and how should we think about it going forward?
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BG: We have a very strong balance sheet with $8.9 billion in cash and equivalents, and over the last three quarters generated $1.2 billion in cash. Cash flow from operations was negative $86 million. Simply explained, while our receivables were down in the quarter with the lower revenue, our payables were down significantly more, as we reduced spending in the second half of the quarter. When our shipments, production and procurement return to a more typical relationship, we expect a reversal of this cash dynamic. Our cash conversion cycle ended at negative 25 days – a decline of four days from last quarter.

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You’ve talked a lot about growth in emerging countries. How did you do in that area in Q3?
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MD: Very well. In the fastest-growing countries and regions we continued to expand at a multiple of the industry rate. We believe we gained significant share in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—and outperformed the industry across Asia-Pacific and Japan. Our BRIC business is up 20 percent versus last year to more than 9 percent of revenue. In fact, our total revenue from those four countries alone would rank among the Fortune 500 companies.

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Can you continue to grow faster than the industry and improve your share position?
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BG: Yes. While we have grown faster than the industry so far this year, we have seen a dramatic change in demand worldwide continuing through the third quarter. In this environment, we will carefully select growth opportunities with a preference toward protecting profitability. This will continue, although there will be products, segments and countries where we selectively choose to grow at a multiple to the industry.

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What are Dell customers telling you about their plans for buying technology in the current economic environment?
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MD: The range of the global economic challenge is obvious to everyone. Customers of all types are still buying technology, but they’re doing so at slower rates, and want to save money when they’re buying and using IT. Our core strength is providing great technology that’s powerful, reliable, flexible and cost effective. We’ve been a primary driver on the price-performance value curve for years and will continue to be. No company is better positioned than Dell to respond to customer needs.

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Commercial customers account for the majority of Dell’s business. How are their needs changing and what is Dell doing in response?
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MD: Their IT agendas have changed. They want to increase productivity and get more value from their IT spending. And they want us to help them get more out of their current IT infrastructures. Foremost in their minds is virtualizing their server, blade and storage infrastructure to improve use and reduce energy costs. We’re helping them do that. We’re also helping them lower costs and increase productivity by managing IT through the cloud and remote infrastructure management tools.

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Is the make-up of your commercial business changing?
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BG: Yes. Over the last four quarters the revenue and profit mix of our commercial business has improved significantly, with more than a third of our revenue now coming from higher-margin products like servers, storage, services and software and peripherals. As I’ve said, we took a measured and balanced approach this quarter to growth and profitability. As a result, operating income margins increased to more than 8 percent of revenue.
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MD: And our commercial products are our strongest ever. During the quarter we launched the new E-series of Latitude notebooks and new Dell Precision notebooks. We refreshed our OptiPlex desktops with four new models. In enterprise computing, our portfolio of scalable products and services is terrific. We now cover nearly 90 percent of customer server requirements, and our plans for next year will get us to 95 percent. We expanded our storage portfolio with “pay as you grow” EqualLogic and PowerVault storage products. And in services, our increasing cloud and remote infrastructure-management services are addressing the biggest customer pain points and two-thirds of the $1.2 trillion IT industry.

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Your Global Consumer business saw significant improvement. What was behind that?
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BG: Our consumer revenue was up 10 percent in the quarter on a 32-percent increase in product shipments. In addition to our direct business online and on the phone, we’ve made our consumer products available in almost 20,000 retail outlets globally. Internally, we reduced our consumer operating-expense dollars by 24 percent from a year ago, which helped improve profitability along with lower product and component costs. 
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MD: We have our broadest, most exciting consumer product line-up ever – in just about any color or configuration you could ask for. Consumers want style and performance, along with mobility, connectivity, and value, and that’s what we’re delivering. We’ve regained feature and design leadership in many categories, and customers are responding. You’re seeing that in products like the Inspiron Mini, the Studio Hybrid desktop, and the Studio 15. Our consumer products collected 41 awards in the third quarter alone. Never has there been a better time to get more technology for the money: built just for you or ready to take home today.

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What is Dell’s plan for issuing additional debt to cover operating costs?
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BG: We’re very comfortable with our financial position. We have access to traditional short- and long-term funding. We have an established commercial paper capacity of $1.5 billion with $253 million outstanding at quarter-end. And we issued $1.5 billion of long-term debt in the first quarter of this year. We filed a new debt shelf registration earlier this month that we can use for future debt, as needed, as capital market conditions improve.

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Given volatility in the credit market, why did you decide to keep Dell Financial Services and what does it contribute to Dell’s business results?
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BG: A very thorough strategic assessment of DFS clearly showed that the best option for our customers and Dell was to continue to own that business. DFS is a strategic asset for Dell and drives incremental sales and margin. It is profitable for us in the current economic and credit cycle and we will continue to effectively manage credit and funding risk. We intend to invest in DFS technology, people and product capability.

On March 31^st we announced several actions we were undertaking to improve the overall competiveness of the company.  One of these actions included a strategic assessment of ownership alternatives for Dell Financial Services (DFS), focused primarily on the consumer and small/medium business revolving credit financing receivables and operations in the U.S. 

We conducted this assessment to evaluate whether: (1) DFS could provide enhanced products and services, (2) we could accelerate the investments we are making in DFS and, (3) or whether there were more efficient ways to fund DFS. 

We have now completed this assessment and have decided that Dell should continue its ownership of Dell Financial Services as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell.  We believe that our current approach is in the best interest of our customers and our company.  We are committed to continued investment in our financing business to expand its product portfolio and provide financing solutions that enable and enrich our customers' experiences. 

DFS's key activities include the origination, collection, and servicing of customer receivables related to the purchase of Dell products.  To learn more about DFS, please refer to Note 5 "Financial Services" of our recently filed fiscal year 2009 10Q.

When Dell announced Q2 financial results on Aug. 28, 2008, we reported continued conservatism in IT spending in the U.S., which had extended into Western Europe and several countries in Asia. The company is seeing further softening in global end-user demand in the current quarter and we felt it was important to share that with investors.

Dell will continue to execute against its five growth priorities of global consumer, small and medium business, enterprise, notebooks and emerging countries. The company expects to incur costs as it realigns its business to improve competitiveness, reduce headcount and invest in infrastructure and acquisitions, but is committed to working aggressively on cost initiatives that will benefit its P&L over time with improved growth, profitability and cash flow. The company grew unit shipments faster than the industry in the first half of calendar 2008 and expects to grow faster than the industry for the full year. 

In addition, Dell Senior Vice President & CFO, Brian T. Gladden, will address investors at the Bank of America Conference in San Francisco today, Tuesday, September 16.  Brian will talk about the company's strategic priorities and then take questions from the audience.  Brian's remarks will be Webcast live at 1:00 p.m. CT, and then be accessible via replay online at  http://www.dell.com/investor. I encourage you to listen in. In addition, the company will report third quarter fiscal year 2009 results Nov. 20, 2008, after the close of market.

Today, 250 equity analysts and institutional investors joined us in Round Rock for Dell's equity analyst meeting. These meetings, which are available via live webcast, serve two important purposes.  First, they give this audience and all of you an opportunity to hear directly from Dell's senior leadership, and second, it's our chance to help you understand where we're going financially, share our key initiatives and address questions and concerns.

The meetings and briefings are spread over two days, with the first day being a prerequisite to discussing our growth priorities on day two.  We spent the first day providing a framework by which investors could understand the fundamental changes we're making to Dell's business model - from manufacturing to channels to services.  

Dell has always been known for its direct model.  With it, we created a direct customer relationship model and build-to-order manufacturing capability like the world had never seen.  Our assets were global and our cycle times were some of the shortest in the industry. 

But today's PC economics are much different.  Moore's law led to better performance, rapid growth and lower selling prices, ultimately leading to smaller absolute cost advantages.  And growth shifted from desktops to notebooks and from large enterprise customers to consumers and small enterprises.  Our customers are more diverse than ever before.  We now need to serve them in very different ways. 

Mike Cannon, President of Dell Global Operations, talked about how Dell is optimizing its global manufacturing network to better meet customer needs.  By matching product design to customer segments, we're able to eliminate embedded product costs.  Getting this part right actually enables us to think more broadly about our manufacturing model and enhance the value we provide our customers.

Many have also questioned how being direct works with channel. The reality is that we have a $10 billion global partner business that we've steadily built for 23 years.  Paul Bell, SVP & President of Dell Americas, spoke to our channel strategy and the investments we're making to better work with VARs and systems integrators. The flexible engagement model we've developed is backed by a compelling value proposition for our partners: our strong brand; a broad portfolio of industry-leading products; and simple, beneficial terms.  It's designed to minimize conflict while building trust and mutually beneficial relationships.  Since we announced this new initiative in Q3, we've worked hard to bring our regional partners onboard to make our solutions available in the geographies that need them most.  

Steve Schuckenbrock, SVP Global Services & CIO, spoke about how customers spend a massive share of their IT budgets on services and how they face a burning need to shift this spend from maintenance to innovation.  We approach services very differently from our competitors.  We believe services should be customizable, a la carte, and available remotely.  So Dell's new services model combines disruptive technologies with our core strengths to provide customers convenient and affordable enterprise-class support and monitoring services.  Through ProSupport and the assets we acquired through several acquisitions we are building a platform that allows us to remotely manage the client lifecycle.  We let customers choose which services they want and when they want them.  And we provide solutions where consultants are available - but not required.  We have a $6.2 billion global services business today, and there is no reason it can't double over the next 3-4 years.

These are changes in the way Dell interacts with customer. They set a foundation upon which we'll build our future success.

If you haven't already seen the webcasts or presentations, I encourage you to watch a replay of them here. 

I know that sounds like a mouthful, so let me take a few minutes to discuss what we announced today.  In May of last year, we announced we were taking steps to improve the competiveness of our operating model, profitability and cash flow.  Restoring competitive advantage means fixing things in our business that will allow us to provide even more value to our customers - and investing in things that will allow us to deliver better and more products and services to our customers around the world.  

Improving profitability means just that and this can be achieved by improving our cost position which is embedded in cost of goods sold (COGS) - like designing products that have the right features for our customers - things they want and value.  Operating expenses (Opex) is also a part of profitability and we believe we can do a better job of managing these expenses - things like reducing headcount (net of acquisitions) and moving more of our people to front line positions - positions that actually touch the customer.  And when you generate profits - cash flow follows.  At least this is the case for Dell.  On an annualized basis we typically generate operating free cash flow in excess of net income - so the more net income we generate - the more cash we generate.  And at the end of the day it's cash that fuels shareholder value.

So in our press release we said we believe we have a $3 billion opportunity to reduce total costs - this includes both COGS and Opex.  Now this does not happen over night.  In fact we said we believe it will take three years to achieve an annualized savings of $3 billion.  This means that before you adjust for growth, we believe our costs at the end of our fiscal 2011 will be $3 billion lower than at the end of fiscal 2008.   A company can do several things with this benefit.  They can use it to strengthen their competitive position and invest back into their business which helps drive growth, they can use it to improve profitability, or they can do both.  We will use it for both - and the split will depend on a variety of things including marketplace dynamics and our growth initiatives.

In our release we also announced that we will be closing our desktop manufacturing in Austin, Texas.   Over the last three years, driven by the massive shift in customer preference for notebooks - especially among consumers, industry forecasts for the rate of growth of desktops have declined from 10.8 percent to 3.6 percent.  And the desktop to notebook mix in the U.S. has declined from a 70/30 split in 2005 in favor of desktops to a 50/50 split today.  Our fiscal fourth quarter of last year reflects this change as we grew notebook units year over year by 37 percent and desktops by 10 percent.

Lastly - in our release we announced we would undertake a strategic assessment of ownership and operating structure alternatives for our Dell Financial Services financing activities.  And that this assessment will primarily focus on the consumer and small/medium business aspect of this business.  We acquired the remaining 30 percent of DFS from our partner, CIT, in December of last year. 

There is a lot of concern out there right now about the credit markets and we've been getting a lot of questions so let me clarify two things relative to Dell. 

First, our assessment of our DFS business is unrelated to what is going on right now in the credit markets - we completed the acquisition and so the natural next step is to pursue our strategy, simple as that.  Many companies - GE and Target - to cite recent examples - often assess the ownership structure of their financing companies.  In our case we are primarily evaluating three key things:  (1) can DFS provide even better and most robust product offerings to our customers, (2) can we accelerate the investments we are making in DFS and, (3) are there more efficient ways to fund DFS.   Our assessment may result in no change, or a sale to or partnership with a fully dedicated financing company.

Second, relative to our consumer financing receivables - less than 20 percent of our net customer receivables - or $1.6 billion - were to subprime customers.   This percentage is similar to what it was in our fiscal third quarter.  Based on our assessment of these customers financing receivables and the associated risks, we believe we are adequately reserved.  If you are interested in this topic I encourage you to read Note 2 Financial Instruments, and Note 6 Financial Services of our Fiscal 2008 10K that we filed today.

To get an update on all of the initiatives we have underway at Dell - I encourage you to listen to our equity analyst meeting which will be held in Round Rock, Texas on Wednesday April 2^nd and Thursday April 3^rd.   You can reach the web cast and accompanying slides via this link: Dell Analyst Meeting.  If you can't listen right away - it will be up on our web site for a while.