DELL HAS had a nightmare this week compounded by the quadruple conjunction of combusting notebooks, a Chinese price probe, a 50% profit drop, and an SEC investigation. Dell"s decision to announce it will use AMD chips for desktops and more adopteron of server MPU Opteron at the end of a terrible week has probably thrown its new friends at AMD Sunnyvale into despair.
First, the financials. In its second quarter it filed a a net profit of $502 million on revenues of $14.09 billion, down from $1.02 billion on revenues of $13.43 billion in the same quarter last year. CEO Kevin Rollins blamed price cuts and a sluggish market for PCs.
Secondly, it said that it had "recently discovered information that raises potential issues relating to certain periods prior to fiscal 2006". It has started an internal audit to investigate. The SEC wrote to Dell this time last year and the firm is cooperating with the Securities and Exchange Commission.