Here’s a good one for you. Michael Dell, CEO and Chairman of Dell, is denying outright that the company is getting into making and selling smartphones. In an interview with CNBC, Dell says they are “not getting into” the smartphone market. This comes after years of making smartphones and dabbling in the smartphone market.
Dell is struggling in the slowing PC market. The company is losing profits and doesn’t have a clear direction. Primarily a PC-maker, the Dell company has fallen behind as consumers switch to tablets and smartphones and move away from traditional PCs. Even laptop sales continue to slide, and Dell doesn’t seem to have an answer. Things are so bad that Michael Dell is in the process of buying back his company from stockholders and taking the company private. This move comes after several years of Dell profits sliding and the company seeming to flounder.
Michael Dell says that the company plans to continue moving in to the tablet market, but that smartphones are best left to the company’s already building smartphones. Newer smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi would beg to differ. The Dell CEO says that his company is better off focusing on back-end support for the current manufacturers of mobile devices. Dell feels that secure access to cloud storage and “securing data” is the company’s key business, and a focus on enterprise customers will help his company more than selling smartphones.
Dell is focusing on 5 key areas, moving forward. Those five areas are the above-mentioned Enterprise segment, expanding “sales capacity through strategic partnerships,” customer satisfaction, emerging markets, and PCs and tablets. Michael Dell referred to tablets as “cloud client computing.”
Dell has tried its hand at selling smartphones in the past, so it’s a little strange for Dell to say the company is not “getting into” smartphones. The Dell Streak line of Android devices never really caught on, and several Windows Phone offerings have also failed to find traction with consumers. Instead, the company is going to work on refreshing their Venue brand of Windows tablets. They are apparently dropping Android altogether and have no plans to pick it back up. Windows tablet sales are not any better than PCs right now, so the future of Dell remains uncertain.