PC maker Dell is moving away from low-value business. The company’s revenue for the

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third quarter ended September 30, 2011, declined 2 per cent mainly because of this, senior company official said. The global strategy is applied in India as well and Dell would continue to focus on higher margins. In line with the announced strategy, Dell’s net profit was up about 12 per cent to $983 million. Enterprise solutions and services business grew by about 8 per cent to $4.7 billion. Total revenue for Q3 was $15.4 billion, flat compared to the corresponding period last year.

Amit Midha, president - South Asia (small & medium businesses), Dell, said during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday: “We’ve been exiting low-value businesses to the tune of about $2 billion. Our overall focus would be on premium business alone. That is the new Dell.”

The strategy reflected in Dell’s PC market share decline in Q3. World over, Lenovo went past Dell for the first time to become the No. 2 PC vendor. According to Gartner, Dell had about 11.6 per cent market share compared to 12.2 per cent in Q3 last year. Lenovo has gained 13.5 per cent share. HP remains the leader at 17.7 per cent. However, in India, Dell remains the top vendor with about 15 per cent, followed by HP and Lenovo at 13.3 per cent and 12.1 per cent respectively.

Midha rationalised the decline in market share saying that the company will no more focus on the mere unit sales of its PCs. Through a series of acquisitions and in-house capability additions over the last couple of years, Dell now operates in the whole spectrum of IT solutions starting from PCs to server, storage, data centre networking, back-end application services and mobility.

Suresh Vaswani, executive VP, Dell Services and chairman Dell India, said: “India is playing a strategic part in driving Dell’s transformation globally into a solutions and services enterprise. We earned $1.4-billion revenue last year in India and have been growing at an average rate of 34 per cent over the past five years. A majority of our revenue here comes from sales of PCs and IT products including servers and storage. In the near future, we plan to bring the full services of our capabilities to India.”

The company’s 50-acre Sriperumbudur facility, which is producing PCs and a small portion of other IT hardware, has enough additional infrastructures to manufacture products beyond PCs, he added. Its current capacity is about 1.6 million units a year.