I was not involved in or aware of any of the accounting irregularities at our company, Dell said during a Citigroup financial analysts’ meeting this week. I’m certainly not proud of what occurred at our company but I’m proud of our company overall.
During a thirty-minute Q&A, Dell also addressed other recent problems at the company, and outlined growth strategies in indirect selling in the consumer market and services offerings in the enterprise.
An internal investigation into Dell’s accounts was resolved last month. It uncovered misconduct in which Dell tampered with accrued liability accruals in order to shift profits between quarters, involved senior executives that were not named.
Michael Dell has now ruled himself out as a candidate for being among the wrongdoers, despite being chairman of the company throughout the period, and CEO for at least a few of the quarters in question.
It’s been a rough year for the company, but since Michael Dell returned to the helm in January, Dell has entered a period of transformation, with moves such as selling Linux PCs, and even the sacrifice of sacred cows such as the direct-only sales model.
Dell started selling PCs through Wal-Mart in the US recently, and Michael Dell said at the Citigroup conference that this indirect channel is key to growing its consumer business.
Pointing out that Dell is not as well known outside the US, he said that the company will look to striking retail deals with major chains in 10 overseas markets, in order to grow this part of the business.
On the enterprise or commercial side, Dell said the company will focus more on services to improve its revenue. It’s an area the company has talked up before, without staggering success.
Asked what kinds of services the company will provide, Michael Dell noted that the company sells 40 millions PCs into organizations every year, which should give it ample opportunity to either upsell or create new types of service-oriented relationships.
Take a large diversified industrial company, said Dell. We start by selling them desktops and notebooks, as we typically would, then we say ‘Hey you’re getting these computers and loading images on them, why don’t you let us load those images in the factory?’.
Then we say, ‘Okay, you’ve got all these people developing images, you’re in 50 countries and you’ve got all these different divisions, each one developing their own images, that takes a lot of time, why not let us develop those images for you?’, he said.
These offerings, alongside services such as software license management, could lead to Dell essentially becoming the IT department for small things within these companies, Dell said.
