The second and final day of our equity analyst meeting featured presentations by Michael Dell, Chairman of the Board and CEO, and Don Carty, Vice Chairman and CFO. 

Right up front, Michael addressed Dell's ability to execute.  He made it clear that Dell is making progress on transforming the company and we are seeing evidence in our recent growth, yet we still have to move faster on costs.  There are no longer any fixed costs within Dell - essentially everything is variable right now.  We have a $3 billion cost opportunity and we're taking aggressive actions to restore our competitive advantage.  We believe operating expense will be down as a percentage of revenue this year.  We also want to deliver a unit growth premium to the industry - this was the case in Q4, and it looks like it is continuing in Q1.  

Don Carty spoke about Dell's financial heritage - one built on striking the optimal balance between liquidity, profitability and growth.  He said that Dell's execution against these priorities hasn't been up to our standards or your expectations.  Dell is strengthening its competitive position and improving profitability by reducing total costs in three ways.  First, we will reduce operating expense, including headcount and compensation.  Second, we will reduce product and procurement costs by designing for price segments and removing features that are not valued by our customers.  Finally, we will reduce manufacturing and logistics costs by optimizing our global manufacturing network.

Later in the morning, other senior executives hosted panel discussions on our five key growth initiatives. 

Steve Felice, SVP and President of Dell Asia/PAC, reviewed our strategy in emerging countries.  Emerging countries represent 85% of the world's population, 30% of worldwide GDP, more than 50% of the worldwide GDP growth... and are a significant opportunity for Dell.  In the IT hardware space, the next billion customers will come from emerging countries.  By 2012, these countries will make up 38% of the world's PC shipments, up from 11% in 1996 (per IDC and Dell estimates).  

Dell is tailoring its products, services and engagement models in these countries to help ensure our place in this tremendous growth opportunity.  In India and Brazil, for example, we largely work directly with customers.  China is closer to a 50/50 split between direct and the channel, while Russia is predominantly channel focused.  We complement these approaches with specific products and services tailored to the needs of customers in those countries.

Dave Marmonti, SVP and President of Dell EMEA, then discussed what we're doing in small and medium enterprises (SME).  Within our SME initiative, we have four global sub-initiatives that will drive our growth: sub-segmentation, customer relationship management, IT-as-a-service and a flexible global channel strategy.  Ultimately, we'll bring differentiated products and capabilities to SMEs who just want to focus on their business, not their IT.

Ron Garriques, President of Dell's Global Consumer Group, said that his goal is simple and straightforward - grow faster than the industry and do so profitably with a great cash conversion cycle.   We get there by getting to the point where COGS and operating expense is competitive and best in class; and by innovating our products and services in order to delight customers independent of the channel they buy through. Growing the profitability of this business is the number one priority.

Jeff Clarke, SVP of Dell's Business Client Product Group, covered our growth strategy in notebooks.  In a nutshell, Dell will deliver more segment-specific products for consumers, SMEs and customers in emerging countries, while being cost competitive across all price bands and channels.

Finally, Brad Anderson, SVP of Dell‘s Business Enterprise Product Group, talked about what we're doing in enterprise.  Last year, $289 billion was spent on enterprise-related IT. Dell's share was a mere 4.4 percent of that.  We get a significant share of total server revenue, but we're under-represented in the other categories of spend - storage, systems management, professional services and support services, etc. So we're creating solutions for customers' greatest challenges.  We'll simplify IT with differentiated, industry-leading solutions, including blades, power & cooling, virtualization, iSCSI storage and cloud computing.

Each of these growth priorities implies there are significant opportunities ahead for Dell.  Our growth in every instance won't be linear, but taken together they represent a thoughtful vision of our industry, the problems and solutions we're tackling, and the white space we're addressing.  It's clearly up to us to drive the right cost model to enhance our competitive position.

Again, if you haven't already seen the webcast or presentation, I encourage you to watch a replay of them here.