Dell Thursday showed what a growing, financially strong, industry-leading company looks like when it reported record revenue and earnings for its third quarter, which ended October 31.
A company spokesperson attributed the results to server and storage sales, which outpaced the industry by a considerable margin.
Revenue for the quarter was US$10.6 billion, up US16 percent compared with the US$9.1 billion recorded the same quarter last year. Earnings hit US$677 million, up 21 percent over the US$561 million reported last year.
For its efforts, Dell ended up with an extra US$1.1 billion in the bank, raising its total cash and investments by quarter-end to US$11.0 billion.
For the quarter, Dell's worldwide server shipments on a volume basis rose 30 percent compared with the same period last year. Storage unit shipments were up 68 percent during that time.
Dell's Condensed Consolidated Statement of Operations tells part of the reason for its high revenue growth during a time when the per-unit pricing of servers and storage is falling: a shift to higher-value products.
About 50 percent of the company's revenue for the quarter came from desktops, down from 52 percent last year. However, its enterprise systems revenue, which includes servers and storage, rose as a percentage of revenue to 22 percent, up from 20 percent the year before. Notebook PC sales remained constant in terms of total revenue at 28 percent. Those numbers included hardware as well as related services, software and peripherals.
Calculating those numbers in revenue terms, Dell's enterprise revenue reached US$2.3 billion this quarter, up 28 percent from last year's US$1.8 billion. Desktop PC revenue was US$5.3 billion, up 13 percent from the US$4.7 billion in sales a year ago.
Overall, services revenue was US$2.6 billion, up 31 percent compared to the prior year's quarter. Software and peripheral revenue was up 26 percent year-over-year. Printer sales were up 70 percent from the second quarter of this year, and are expected to increase 80 percent next quarter, company officials said.
For Dell, the good news is not expected to end this quarter. Michael Dell, chairman and CEO, told analysts on Thursday that his company expects fourth-quarter shipments, including desktops, notebooks and enterprise products, to rise 25 percent compared with the fourth quarter of last year.
Fourth-quarter revenue is expected to hit US$11.5 billion, up 18 percent from last year, while earnings are expected to reach US28 cents per share, up 22 percent.
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