Dell Earnings Call Nuggets: Vendor Settlements and Incremental Price Aggression

Dell Inc (NASDAQ:DELL) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Vendor Settlements

Shannon Cross – Cross Research: Brian, I just had a question on the vendor settlements. $250 million is a pretty significant amount. Was that one vendor or multiple? And then also, if you think about the reinvestment you did, was that part of sort of the pricing you talked about on the PC side?

Brian T. Gladden – SVP and CFO: Yeah, it was a series of settlements that made up that amount in the quarter. And really, the way we thought about it, we had visibility to the settlement early in the quarter and we were able to use that to selectively get more aggressive in pricing in some parts of the business. That’s how we thought about it in the quarter.