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Special Report
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Dell
Dell has identified consumers as a major growth opportunity, and is targeting them with a “click, call, or visit” multi-channel strategy. It is having to start from scratch, however: Dell is fundamentally a company set up to sell directly to medium and large enterprises. Currently only 15% of Dell’s revenues come from consumers and nearly all of this is via Dell’s own website and telesales operations.
Dell plans to have products in 10,000 retail stores at the start of 2008. It has made considerable progress signing-up retailers around the world (see sidebar), focusing on high-volume “value price” outlets.
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Dell is making considerable progress in diversifying its product mix (only 60% of its revenue came from PCs and notebooks during 2007) and it is supplying retailers with printers, ink and toner, and flatscreen LCD monitors, as well as desktop and notebook PCs.
Dell plans to sign one or two retail partners in each of the 20 largest countries (most of its UK and European retailers belong to DSG International, Europe’s largest specialist electrical retailing group). Dell has also signed Tesco who will sell Dell PCs in many Tesco Stores in the UK and in several other European countries. Many of these retailers have their own online stores which Dell product is available through.
We wait to see if Dell can adjust its supply chain to service its new retail channel, and to see whether customers will prefer to buy standardised models in-store or to create their own custom-ordered PC when they return home from the shops.
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