Dell’s Consumer Notebook Sales Drop 20% in 2Q

Dell Inc.’s notebook computer sales to consumers sank nearly 20 percent in the second quarter because of problems finishing laptops and shipping them to customers. On the other side, Hewlett-Packard Co. sold almost three times more notebooks to the consumer sector during the same period than Dell did, ComputerWorld reports.

According to Dell’s just released financial figures, the company sold 887,000 notebooks to the consumer market during the 2Q 2007. Analyst Mikako Kitagawa said HP sold 2.4 million notebooks, while Apple Inc. sold 1.1 million of their MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops in the second quarter, which is a 42% jump over the same quarter last year.

Dell officially said that “during the quarter, the company ran a higher-than-normal product backlog, driven by better-than-expected demand for the new Inspiron and XPS color notebooks, coupled with supply constraints for several colors, and a tightening in supply of certain flat-panel displays.”

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