With 13% of the PC market, Dell depends on the Internet for efficiency
Since starting out as a student-run business in founder Michael Dell’s dorm room in 1984, Dell Computer Corp. has grown into an international company with annual worldwide revenues of $31.8 billion. About 15% of its business is in b2c sales, and though the company is now also pursuing sales of enterprise-scaled systems, the Internet remains a key channel for its PC-focused consumer business, Dell CIO and senior vice president Randy Mott told keynote session attendees at Retail Systems 20002 in Chicago this week.
Though development of the Internet as a commerce medium hasn’t kept pace with earlier projections made from atop the dot-com bubble, “The Internet isn’t dead,” Mott said. “ It’s a viable tool for us.” Mott said the company leads the category in the sale of PCs with about 13% of the PC market. Worldwide, Dell`s online orders for PCs and related equipment, consisting of new orders and re-orders, run as high as $50 million per day.
During the holiday buying season at the end of last year, Dell’s web site processed requests for as many as 1 million quotes for PC systems a day, Mott told the audience. Turning the quotes around required that individual PC systems be configured based on the customer’s request and priced accordingly, a process largely automated by Dell technology. Given that kind of volume, “The Internet is a cost-effective way for us to do business, " he added.
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