Tue. Aug. 12, 2008
by Lynn A. Tyson, VP - Investor Relations
Today we introduced our new, business Latitude E-Series notebook line. This is the largest product rollout in our history. You may remember that one of our five strategic priorities is focused on notebooks. This launch is another milestone in notebooks as we move further down the path of expanding our number of products, designing around specific cost points and customer needs, while simplifying the overall experience for our customers.
As background, Dell has long been a leader in the commercial notebook space, currently holding 32.9% and 19.2% share positions respectively in the US and worldwide according to IDC. Overall our corporate business is a $52 billion business based on the past four quarters and Dell has sold over 50 million Latitude notebooks since the product's introduction in 1994. The importance of our notebook priority is underscored by a number of trends. Notebooks are expected to outsell desktops by seven times during the course of 2008, growing to a $137 billion opportunity by year-end. This increase will be fueled by explosive growth in the emerging countries, where Brazil, Russia and China all grew at over two times the industry in the past year. In fact, many new users are simply skipping desktops and adopting notebooks as their first PC.
Size isn't the only important dynamic defining the notebook industry, as notebook replacement cycles are typically faster than desktops and carry traditionally higher average selling prices and margins.
We typically undertake a wholesale refresh of our business products every five to six years to provide consistency and longevity for our corporate customers. This time around we have made significant changes from the typical corporate product rollout. We have listened to our customers whether they are road warriors, typical office users, or those with specialty and advanced performance needs. Based on that input, we have completely revamped the line, differentiating ourselves from the competition in terms of design, performance and portfolio breadth.
Some of the key product highlights, which set Dell apart from the competition with this launch, are:
- A completely new look as we have made use of advanced materials, more aggressive design, and even added colors as we are beginning to see "consumerization" in the business market.
- Highly mobile business customers continually ask for more battery life. In these news systems, battery lives can last as long as 19 hours on a single charge and have accelerated charging capabilities.
- Dell Latitude ON, which provides near instant access to email, internet, and other calendar related items with multi-day battery time without full operating system start.
- Better connectivity and security features with Dell Control Point. Dell Control Point is an exclusive application enabling management of all connection configurations and customizable security profiles in one spot rather than making changes in several control panels and applications.
- This new product line also has significant range with everything from an ultra-portable system weighing in at only 2.2 lbs to a semi-rugged notebook, which has an outdoor viewable display and shock mounted hard drive to a product with superior graphics capabilities and a quad-core processor to handle the most demanding computing needs.
You will hear a lot about this launch over the next several weeks. I encourage you to learn more about the E-Series products at our E-Series site launch page (http://www.digitalnomads.com/).
As always, we welcome your comments and feedback on the launch through this blog. We look forward to hearing from you!