Dell Computers

At age 13, Michael Dell was running a mail-order stamp-trading business, complete with a national catalog, and grossing $2,000 per month. At 16, he was selling subscriptions to the Houston Post. He enrolled at the University of Texas in 1983 as a premed student but soon became absorbed in computers and started selling PC parts out of his college dorm room. He bought random-access memory (RAM) chips and disk drives for IBM PCs at cost from IBM dealers, who often had excess supplies on hand because they were required to order large monthly quotas from IBM. Dell resold the components through newspaper ads at 10-15 percent below the regular retail price.

By April 1984 sales were running about $80,000 per month. Dell dropped out of college and formed a company, PCs Ltd., to sell both PC components and PCs under the brand name PCs Limited. He obtained his PCs by buying retailers' surplus stocks at cost, then powering them up with graphics cards, hard disks, and memory before reselling them. His strategy was to sell directly to end users; by eliminating the retail markup, Dell's new company was able to sell IBM clones at about 40 percent below the price of an IBM PC. The price discounting strategy was successful, attracting price-conscious buyers and producing rapid growth. By 1985, the company was assembling its own PC designs with a few people. The company had 40 employees, and Michael Dell worked 18-hour days. By the end of fiscal 1986, sales had reached $33 million.

During the next several years, however, PCs Ltd. was hampered by a lack of money, people, and resources. Michael Dell sought to refine the company's business model, add needed production capacity, and build a bigger, deeper management staff and corporate infrastructure while at the same time keeping costs low. The company was renamed Dell Computer in 1987, and the first international offices were opened that same year. In 1988 Dell added a sales force to serve large customers, began selling to government agencies, and became a public company¡Xraising $34.2 million in its first offering of common stock. Sales to large customers quickly became the main part of Dell's business. By 1990 Dell Computer had sales of $388 million, a market share of 2-3 percent, and an R&D staff of over 150 people. Michael Dell's vision was for Dell Computer to become one of the top three PC companies.