ITWire

Things aren't looking so rosy on a global basis. Worldwide, Dell reported a 17 percent drop in profitability for the quarter.

"We are making progress in improving productivity and reducing costs," said CFO Brian Gladden.

"Strategic actions to accelerate growth in certain areas of our business affected gross margins this quarter and there will be some non-linearity in the improvements in our operating income margins as we rebalance our portfolio, make cost improvements and drive growth."

Those cost reductions include the loss of 8500 jobs, with another 400 set to go during the current quarter. Your cheap computer is someone else's severance notice.

As for founder, chairman and CEO Michael Dell, he said "We are positioning Dell to win in a new era of global IT spending."

"We have our most competitive product portfolio ever – whether for digital nomads or hyper-scaled data centers. Our growth at a multiple of the industry across all major product categories for the second consecutive quarter affirms we are on track with our five key business priorities – notebooks, consumer, enterprise, SMB and emerging countries."

In related news, Dell this week announced a new series of Vostro notebooks and desktops designed for selected countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America where low cost is a priority.

"Within the world's emerging economies millions of new businesses are demanding just the technology they need, at the prices they can afford, from a vendor they can trust... we answer that need by introducing new products that join our existing Vostro product line,” said Felice.

The new systems are based on Intel Celeron, Pentium, Atom and Core 2 Duo CPUs, and are variously offered with Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista. They deliver "industry leading prices for the features you are getting," Felice claimed.