Dell Computers :: essays research papers

At age 13, Michael Dell was raceway a mail-order stamp-trading business, complete with a national catalog, and grossing $2,000 per month. At 16, he was marketing subscriptions to the Houston Post. He enrolled at the University of Texas in 1983 as a premed student and soon became absorbed in computers and started shifting PC parts verboten of his college dorm room. He bought random-access memory (RAM) chips and disk drives for IBM PCs at cost from IBM dealers, who a good deal had excess supplies on hand because they were required to order large periodical quotas from IBM. Dell resold the components through newspaper ads at 10-15 percent below the even retail price.By April 1984 sales were running ab appear $80,000 per month. Dell dropped out of college and formed a company, PCs Ltd., to sell both PC components and PCs under the blot name PCs Limited. He obtained his PCs by buying retailers surplus stocks at cost, wherefore powering them up with graphics cards, hard disks, and memory before reselling them. His strategy was to sell directly to end users by eliminating the retail markup, Dells new company was subject to sell IBM clones at about 40 percent below the price of an IBM PC. The price discounting strategy was successful, attracting price-conscious buyers and producing rapid growth. By 1985, the company was assembling its proclaim PC designs with a few people. The company had 40 employees, and Michael Dell worked 18-hour days. By the end of fiscal 1986, sales had reached $33 one million million million.During the next several years, however, PCs Ltd. was hampered by a lack of money, people, and resources. Michael Dell sought to refine the companys business model, render needed production capacity, and build a bigger, deeper management staff and bodily infrastructure while at the same time keeping be low. The company was renamed Dell Computer in 1987, and the first international offices were capable that same year. In 1988 Dell added a sa les force to coif large customers, began selling to government agencies, and became a public companyXraising $34.2 million in its first offering of common stock. Sales to large customers chop-chop became the main part of Dells business. By 1990 Dell Computer had sales of $388 million, a market share of 2-3 percent, and an R&D staff of over cl people. Michael Dells vision was for Dell Computer to become one of the top third PC companies.