Premium Notebooks Spurred ‘Record Holiday Season’ for Dell Consumer Business

It was a “record holiday season” in the consumer business for Dell Technologies, said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman-products and operations, on a Thursday earnings call. Dell’s premium notebooks grew by double digits in the fiscal year ended Feb. 2, as did “demand for gaming and rugged notebooks,” he said. In calendar Q4, Dell “delivered our 20th straight quarter of year-over-year worldwide PC unit share gains,” he said. “That said, our growth premium has slowed the past two quarters, so we're focused on driving higher relative unit growth in a consolidating market while maintaining profitability” in the fiscal year ending February 2019, he said. An IDC report in January on global PC shipments for Q4 ranked Dell third behind HP and Lenovo at 15.7 percent share, roughly the same share it had in the same quarter a year earlier. The report estimated that the PC market in Q4 achieved its first positive holiday-quarter shipment growth in six years -- albeit only a 0.7 percent increase from Q4 a year earlier.