2nd UPDATE: Dell To Invest $1 Billion In Product Development, Data Centers

Personal computer maker Dell Inc. (DELL) will invest $1 billion worldwide in the current fiscal year to build new data centers and develop sets of products in areas such as virtualization, Paul Bell, Dell's president of public and large enterprise business units, said Thursday.

The spending comes as Dell aims to fuel growth by expanding its businesses outside of computer hardware. Dell's personal computer business is facing growing competition from rivals such as Taiwan's Acer Inc. and from the rising popularity of tablet devices like Apple Inc.'s iPad.

The spending will cover "many" new data centers and the construction and staffing of 22 new "solutions centers" worldwide, including 12 to be completed this year, where customers can be trained and work with the company on products, Bell said at a conference in Beijing.

Research and development spending will focus on products such as a package of hardware and setup services meant to launch the virtualization of a customer's systems, Bell said.

Virtualization refers to a process that converts individual servers into multiple virtual servers, allowing them to share their workloads more efficiently. Dell's last fiscal year ended Jan. 28, according to its official earnings release.

Bell also said Dell has experienced some supply chain disruptions related to Japan's earthquake last month, but the impact has been "relatively small." Power disruptions affected production for certain Japanese suppliers, Bell said without elaborating.

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami as well as the nuclear crisis in Japan have highlighted the dominance of many Japanese electronic-component makers and raised concerns that disruptions to their production could cause shortages and price spikes for products such as memory chips and liquid-crystal display panels.

U.S.-based Dell also plans to launch a 10-inch tablet device in China in the second quarter of the fiscal year, Michael Yang, Dell's president for the Greater China region, told reporters on the sidelines of the conference. He called the device "Streak 10."

The company plans to start sales of its five-inch Streak tablet in China this month, he told reporters.

In February, Dell said it planned to release a 10-inch tablet running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 7 operating system this year.

Dell and other makers of computers and devices, like Samsung Electronics and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., are looking to diversify their product lines and create new revenue streams by offering tablet devices in competition with the iPad.

Dell also plans to launch new smartphones in China starting this year, adding to its three to four smartphone models already selling in China, Yang said, without elaborating.

The company is looking for acquisition opportunities in China to support its offerings in areas such as storage and cloud computing but the company hasn't identified any specific acquisition targets, he said.

-By Owen Fletcher, Dow Jones Newswires; 8610 8400 7702; owen.fletcher@dowjones.com

Dell (NASDAQ:DELL)
과거 데이터 주식 차트
부터 6월(6) 2024 으로 7월(7) 2024