Dell shows there is plenty of life in the commercial PC market

The clearest evidence that there is still life in the PC market has come from Dell with the vendor enjoying a strong performance in the commercial segment in its second quarter.

The firm saw its client services group division produce a 6% improvement in revenue, year-on-year, with commercial sales improving by 12%.

Dell stated that the quarter had seen record revenue and units and that there had been double digit growth across commercial notebooks, desktops and workstations.

"We are in the early stages of a technology-led investment cycle. IT spending remains healthy and our business drivers remain strong," said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman, Dell Technologies.

"We are innovating and integrating across the Dell Technologies portfolio, from the edge to the core to the cloud, with a diverse business designed to succeed in any macro environment," he added.

The expectation is that the positive conditions in the PC market will continue for the rest of this year and possibly beyond as customers migrate to the latest Windows OS to avoid the end of support deadline on Windows 7.

"PCs grew 6% overall and 12% in commercial. I believe this is driven by the portfolio competitiveness and Windows 10 transition. I expect the Windows 10 transition to have a positive market impact the next two or three quarters," said Patrick Moorhead, founder, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

The infrastructure solutions group did not have such a good quarter with a 7% decline in revenues, with servers and networking down 12% and storage flat year-on-year.

Other highlights from Dell included a 2% increase in revenues for Q2 to come in at $23.4bn and net income moved back into the black reaching $4.5bn.

Dell ended the quarter with a cash and investments balance of $10bn and during Q2 the firm repaid $2bn of gross debt keeping it on track to pay back $5bn in fiscal 2020.