Probe into Dell accounting widens
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Dude, you're not getting a filing Stumbling computer maker Dell has been forced to delay a second quarter financial report and to put its stock repurchase program on hold as it deals with federal and state accounting probes.â¦
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WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is broadening its investigation of Boeing Co.&#39;s contracting scandal, increasing the potential for more financial and legal hits for the aerospace giant.
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Dell&#39;s efforts to reinvent itself this year through a dramatic break from its direct-sales model, expanded services, and new enterprise offerings have shown positive early results, but some users have lingering concerns about supply chain management and support -- long-time issues for the company.Weathering an accounting scandal and a slump in profit,&#160;founder Michael Dell reclaimed the helm of the company after CEO Kevin Rollins resigned in January, quickly replacing top managers and in May announcing plans to lay off 10 percent of the company&#39;s workforce.For years, Dell was the top PC vendor in the world, an acknowledged master of logistics in a business where margins can be razor-thin. It was efficient enough to keep prices low to ward off competition without suffering big setbacks in profits. But by 2006, when Hewlett-Packard unseated Dell as global PC leader, that was no longer the case.Dell&#39;s plans to regain its former dominance have resounded in the market. The company&#39;s third-quarter results, announced two weeks ago, showed profit increasing year over year, and record revenue of $15.65 billion. During the company&#39;s earnings call, Michael Dell said the company will put products on more retail shelves worldwide while also helping business customers &quot;simplify IT&quot; and reduce maintenance costs via customized hardware, software, and services.The company has also moved to put accounting issues behind it, recently&#160;completing an internal investigation and restating its financial results from fiscal 2003 to the first quarter of 2007.The company has been making an effort to build relationships with customers and partners and deliver products that are easier to deploy and manage, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.Last month, Dell introduced a two-tier channel program designed to give partners better access to Dell&#39;s training, marketing, certification, and online resources. The program will provide a better chance for Dell to interact and understand its partners&#39; needs, the company said.&quot;The company seems to recognize that it has bridges to enhance with customers and partners in the channel. It&#39;s not something that&#39;s going to change overnight,&quot; King said.After years of success selling PCs directly to users, the consumer business&#39; direct-sales business model hit a wall as component prices fell, Pund-IT&#39;s King said. The strategy to simplify IT is a play at SMBs that will help Dell deliver better returns in the long term than its lower-margin direct consumer business, analysts said.However, some customers continue to have concerns about the company&#39;s support and supply chain issues.Dell is having supply shortages and can&#39;t get its servers and OptiPlex desktops to individuals and small businesses in a timely manner, said Josh Kaplan, who runs a franchise of computer support firm Rescuecom and purchases parts and interacts with Dell on behalf of customers.&quot;You can acquire all the technology you want, but Dell will send hardware out blindly,&quot; Kaplan said. It will be a challenge for Dell to deliver what it calls &quot;IT in a box&quot; -- its terms for packages of products and services -- to SMBs and enterprises, Kaplan said. Dell has traditionally delivered mostly standardized systems, Kaplan said. While Dell has built systems to order by letting users select from a menu of options, it does not have in-depth experience offering customers services over the lifecycle of products, he said.Jeremy Cole, owner of Proven Scaling, a small consulting firm with offices in the U.S. and U.K., said Dell has internal staffing issues that affect its support services.&quot;Dell&#39;s sales structure is really strange. They tend to bounce your company around to a new account representative every few months who are wildly differing in experience, intelligence, and understanding of the Dell sales system,&quot; Cole said.Cole is satisfied with Dell equipment but said the company needs to show more support for open-source applications and the Linux OS. &quot;It&#39;s clear that Dell cares about Linux in that all its server-class hardware is well-supported by the Linux kernel and it has many people dedicated to making sure that&#39;s the case. However, it&#39;s not good enough just to boot,&quot; Cole said.Though generally positive about Dell&#39;s support, Jason Dunn, who runs Thoughts Media, which publishes Web sites for technology enthusiasts, couldn&#39;t resolve certain LCD&#160;monitor problems with Dell offshore support representatives. He had good experiences with Dell&#39;s PC and HDTV support representatives, so the experience varies, Dunn said.Other users have had a good experience with Dell&#39;s strategy to simplify IT. Dell&#39;s efforts have paid dividends for Bikeworld.com, a medium-size retail business in San Antonio, which saved money by cutting its internal IT person. The company uses Dell systems with Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, connected to multiple offices via a VPN.&quot;Businesses are in a belt-tightening mode. You can&#39;t have extra people on payroll,&quot; said Whit Snell, general partner at Bikeworld.com. Bikeworld has resolved IT problems with Dell remotely and has a contact readily available to help with problems.Dell officials were not available for comment on support issues.Overall, Dell is trying to be more proactive and helpful, said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates. Dell&#39;s new enterprise support services to simplify IT, like remote management services, could, if successful, trickle into the consumer segment, which could benefit end-users, Scherf said.Dell this year has tied up with retailers like Staples,&#160;Wal-Mart, and&#160;Best Buy&#160;to distribute PCs, something competitors HP and Acer have been successful at. But if Dell wants to make sure its customers aren&#39;t tempted by HP or Lenovo in the retail market, fixing problems that some users report about its support infrastructure has to be on top of the company&#39;s to-do list, Pund-IT&#39;s King said.Building out retail partnerships changes the consumer-facing relationships for Dell, which could lead to positive changes in the company&#39;s support and services. The results are a work in progress, King said.Balancing out its business model, Dell is showing signs that renewed efforts in the higher-end business sector are catching on, with third-quarter revenue growing in the server and storage markets. The enterprise market provides better margins than retail, and the remote management services market is growing, King said. Dell is trying to address that through acquisitions and by creating a services organization and specialized products targeted at professionals and businesses.The company this year&#160;acquired SAN (storage area network) vendor EqualLogic&#160;and managed services companies&#160;Everdream&#160;and Silverback. It announced a deal with Sun to offer the company&#39;s Solaris OS.Dell has been pushing hard to improve its systems management portfolio, especially remote desktop management capabilities that could help simplify complex IT infrastructures. In October, the company announced On-Demand Desktop Streaming, a server-based platform that streams the OS, applications and data to diskless desktop clients over a Gigabit Ethernet network.By offering design improvements and bundling software and services like remote management, Dell is trying to get the focus off of price and moving to build the framework for a new business model for the enterprise, said John Spooner, senior analyst at Technology Business Research.Dell&#39;s reinvention should come as no surprise as Michael Dell is on a mission to reconstruct his company, Pund-IT&#39;s King said. &quot;It must have been hard for Dell to see a company he built falter,&quot; King said. He is putting money in the right spots, and competitors like HP and IBM will do well to keep a close eye on Dell, King said.
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The law firm of Milberg Weiss announced today that it is investigating possible illegal conduct relating to 401(k) retirement plans at computer maker Dell Inc. Specifically, Milberg Weiss is investigating whether fiduciaries of the Dell Inc.
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Computer maker Dell Inc. DELL.O said   on Monday that an expanding government accounting probe has   caused the company to cancel a meeting with Wall Street   analysts for the second time this year and that it will suspend   stock buybacks.
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ROUND ROCK, Texas -- Dell Inc., the world's largest personal computer maker, said Friday that it is increasing the recall of Sony Corp. battery packs used in its systems to 4.2 million units from 4.1 million units.
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Yesterday's release by Dell Computer of very preliminary earnings numbers for its previous fiscal quarter may give investors at least a handful of data to help them understand the turmoil from which it may be recovering...if it is recovering. The company doesn't appear to be hemorrhaging, and there seems to be at least some good news. But it's hard not to keep seeing question marks and unresolved issues.
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By Matt Slagle  Dell Inc. added to its litany of woes on Monday when the world's largest PC maker said it would not file its second-quarter earnings report to government regulators on time because of "questions raised" by an informal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.
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Dell  said on Friday it  received a letter from Nasdaq saying the computer maker was not  in compliance with listing requirements because it was late in  filing its fiscal third-quarter report.
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Dell Inc. (DELL.O), the world's largest PC maker, could announce an expanded selection of its consumer electronics line in the next several weeks, a retail industry analyst said on Wednesday.
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Computer maker Dell Inc.   filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on  Thursday to delay its third-quarter financial report, citing  ongoing regulatory investigations into its accounting and  financial reporting matters.
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(InfoWorld) - Stock in Dell was rising Monday on news thatÂ founder Michael Dell plans to remain as CEO for several years, trim the number of managers reporting directly to him, and eliminate bonuses. "We have a tough couple of quarters ahead. We didn't get here overnight, and we won't fix things overnight either," Dell wrote in a memo to employees on Friday. "Last year ... we had great efforts but not great results. This is disappointing, and it is unacceptable." Dell pointed to several problems with the company, including an overgrown bureaucracy and operating expenses that had grown too fast. "We have great people ... but we also have a new enemy: bureaucracy, which costs us money and slows us down. We created it, we subjected our people to it, and we have to fix it!" Dell said. "I am asking each of you to look across your organizations and eliminate redundancies." On Monday, a corporate spokeswoman confirmed the authenticity of the memo, which had been leaked to media over the weekend. The company has been buffeted in recent days by the resignation of CEO Kevin Rollins last Wednesday,Â Michael Dell announcing he would take over that job, and the accusation inÂ a lawsuit by investorsÂ on Friday that 15 top executives had garnered millions of dollars by selling their stock after propping up the company's faltering revenue with secret payments from Intel. Even before those blows landed, Dell was wobbling on a threat by the Nasdaq stock exchange to drop its stock unless the company files its overdue quarterly earnings reports.Â Dell has delayed filing those numbers for the past two terms as it struggles to satisfy an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of its accounting practices. It is not yet clear if that investigation is related to the investors' charges that Dell hid payments by Intel in exchange for staying exclusively loyal to one brand of microprocessor in its PCs. When Michael Dell announced on Wednesday he would return to his position as CEO, the company was already in the midst of a reorganization plan that calls for $100 million in spending to improve the customer service practices that allow it to bypass retail stores with its famed "direct sales" business model. The company was also following Rollins' plan toÂ remake itself as "Dell 2.0,"Â trying to move beyond an enormousÂ notebook PC battery recall in August by focusing on industrial design, overseas factories, and a move to diversify its computers by using chips fromÂ AMD as well as those from Intel. In his Friday memo, Dell added new details to that strategy. He promised to turn around the company by focusing on the SMB sector, enterprise servers and storage, shorter design cycles for new products, and increased sales in emerging markets. He also made a few corporate changes, recalling Paul Bell from his job running the company's markets in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) to lead Dell's new Americas group, which includes the fast-growing SMB sector. Dell also created a "global operations" division to focus on manufacturing and procurement. "I remember what it's like to start a company. We're moving fast. There is no luxury of time. The competitors are fierce. The difference is this time we have many new assets and some hidden ones that can be brought out," he wrote. Dell did not describe the hidden assets he would use to rescue his company's prospects, but he hinted that Dell had enough resources to outspend its competition. AlthoughÂ Dell handed the title of world's largest PC vendor to HP this year, it is still a corporate colossus. "When I started back in 1984, it was just me. But now we are blessed to have an awesome team, many great assets, and $11 billion or so," Dell said. Â
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DALLAS -- Dell Inc.'s fourth-quarter profits plunged 33 percent because of weak sales of laptops and notebooks, and the computer maker still faces an unresolved federal accounting probe, customer service complaints, several shareholder lawsuits and stiff competition from rivals.
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The Nasdaq stock market extend Dell a deadline for filing late reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company announced.
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Hewlett-Packard says it discussed allegations that employees spied on rival, but Dell wants more thorough investigation.
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The FBI has widened an investigation of a Pentagon analyst suspected of giving classified information on Iran to Israel, the Washington Post reported, citing unnamed officials and others familiar with the inquiry.
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Still gasping fromÂ the resignation of its chief executiveÂ in January andÂ an ongoing investigation of its accounting practices, Dell reported fourth quarter profits of $673 million, down sharply from the $1 billion it reported for the same period last year.