Mon. Mar. 31, 2008
I know that sounds like a mouthful, so let me take a few minutes to discuss what we announced today. In May of last year, we announced we were taking steps to improve the competiveness of our operating model, profitability and cash flow. Restoring competitive advantage means fixing things in our business that will allow us to provide even more value to our customers - and investing in things that will allow us to deliver better and more products and services to our customers around the world.
Improving profitability means just that and this can be achieved by improving our cost position which is embedded in cost of goods sold (COGS) - like designing products that have the right features for our customers - things they want and value. Operating expenses (Opex) is also a part of profitability and we believe we can do a better job of managing these expenses - things like reducing headcount (net of acquisitions) and moving more of our people to front line positions - positions that actually touch the customer. And when you generate profits - cash flow follows. At least this is the case for Dell. On an annualized basis we typically generate operating free cash flow in excess of net income - so the more net income we generate - the more cash we generate. And at the end of the day it's cash that fuels shareholder value.
So in our press release we said we believe we have a $3 billion opportunity to reduce total costs - this includes both COGS and Opex. Now this does not happen over night. In fact we said we believe it will take three years to achieve an annualized savings of $3 billion. This means that before you adjust for growth, we believe our costs at the end of our fiscal 2011 will be $3 billion lower than at the end of fiscal 2008. A company can do several things with this benefit. They can use it to strengthen their competitive position and invest back into their business which helps drive growth, they can use it to improve profitability, or they can do both. We will use it for both - and the split will depend on a variety of things including marketplace dynamics and our growth initiatives.
In our release we also announced that we will be closing our desktop manufacturing in Austin, Texas. Over the last three years, driven by the massive shift in customer preference for notebooks - especially among consumers, industry forecasts for the rate of growth of desktops have declined from 10.8 percent to 3.6 percent. And the desktop to notebook mix in the U.S. has declined from a 70/30 split in 2005 in favor of desktops to a 50/50 split today. Our fiscal fourth quarter of last year reflects this change as we grew notebook units year over year by 37 percent and desktops by 10 percent.
Lastly - in our release we announced we would undertake a strategic assessment of ownership and operating structure alternatives for our Dell Financial Services financing activities. And that this assessment will primarily focus on the consumer and small/medium business aspect of this business. We acquired the remaining 30 percent of DFS from our partner, CIT, in December of last year.
There is a lot of concern out there right now about the credit markets and we've been getting a lot of questions so let me clarify two things relative to Dell.
First, our assessment of our DFS business is unrelated to what is going on right now in the credit markets - we completed the acquisition and so the natural next step is to pursue our strategy, simple as that. Many companies - GE and Target - to cite recent examples - often assess the ownership structure of their financing companies. In our case we are primarily evaluating three key things: (1) can DFS provide even better and most robust product offerings to our customers, (2) can we accelerate the investments we are making in DFS and, (3) are there more efficient ways to fund DFS. Our assessment may result in no change, or a sale to or partnership with a fully dedicated financing company.
Second, relative to our consumer financing receivables - less than 20 percent of our net customer receivables - or $1.6 billion - were to subprime customers. This percentage is similar to what it was in our fiscal third quarter. Based on our assessment of these customers financing receivables and the associated risks, we believe we are adequately reserved. If you are interested in this topic I encourage you to read Note 2 Financial Instruments, and Note 6 Financial Services of our Fiscal 2008 10K that we filed today.
To get an update on all of the initiatives we have underway at Dell - I encourage you to listen to our equity analyst meeting which will be held in Round Rock, Texas on Wednesday April 2nd and Thursday April 3rd. You can reach the web cast and accompanying slides via this link: Dell Analyst Meeting. If you can't listen right away - it will be up on our web site for a while.