Dell to Keep Expanding

Beyond Desktop PCs:
"Dell Inc. chief executive Kevin Rollins said Thursday the company will continue to expand beyond traditional desktop PCs and offer more flat panel televisions, laptops and printers to help grow its business to $80 billion within four years...
Rollins said the company's increasing push into servers, data-storage equipment, printers, consumer electronics and technology services will help offset cooling desktop PC demand. According to IDC, PC shipments are expected to grow by a more moderate 10 percent this year.

Analysts welcomed the diversification talk in the face of rivals HP and IBM. ``It's a scale issue. What they're really saying is that they are going to be able to scale to the level of an IBM or an HP,'' Ron Silliman of Gartner said. ``Dell is going into that scale more focused but also talking diversification. This organization is probably the most rigorous in the industry on the question of execution.''

Dell also said it would spend $2 billion to repurchase stock in the current quarter, or about 50 million shares, more than double what the company had initially planned. In the past four years, the company has bought back enough stock to reduce its average share count by more than 9 percent."