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Rumours emerged that Dell was contemplating taking itself private. See FT Dell surge on buyout hopes. These were enough to send Dell’s share price up 13% yesterday. HP rose 5% in sympathy!
Rather than giving our own take on this, I thought George O’Connor at Panmure Gordon wrote a great piece on the subject in his morning note today.
He said:
Despite its moves to dilute, PCs are still c50% of Dell’s revenue. But from its 2012 R&A we read “Without legacy products and business models to hold us back, Dell is uniquely positioned in the industry to adopt, develop and deploy the evolutionary and revolutionary solutions our customers need to do and achieve more” –so the right thinking is there – and it is hard to ‘transform’ in the public gaze.
Timings don’t help though. Yesterday thoughts from Gartner: “Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by ‘cannibalising’ PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC.” All of this comes about as Gartner says that worldwide PC shipments totalled 90.3m units in Q4/2012, -4.9% YOY. PC shipments in EMEA fell by 9.6%.
At O’Connor Towers we only have one (rarely used) PC now but a host of other bits and pieces.
