Dell says its decision to delay PC price increases until January helped it significantly boost client marketshare in Q4, as it closed the book on a “monumental” year.
The Texas-based hardware giant saw revenues for its year to 30 January 2026 vault 19% to $113.5bn, mainly thanks to rocketing demand for AI infrastructure.
Dell was among a number of vendors to raise infrastructure prices in December as the AI-fuelled memory shortage began to bite.
On an earnings call last night, COO Jeff Clarke said the NYSE-listed outfit purposely held off implementing price rises in its PC business until 6 January in a bid to “stay in the hunt to take share”.
“You saw that in the share results,” he said.
“Our business grew 18% in a market that grew 10%. We took 100 basis points of share. We chose not to take our foot off the accelerator.”
Dell’s Client Solutions Group business grew revenues rise 14% year on year to $13.5bn in Q4, while its Infrastructure Solutions Group arm’s top line vaulted 73% to $19.6bn.
The news comes after HPE and Cisco earlier this month wrote to partners informing them they are now reserving the right to raise prices post-PO on some technologies as memory chip shortages deepen (see here and here).
On its recent Q1 earnings call, HP Interim CEO Bruce Broussard said he expected DRAM and NAND pricing volatility to remain “throughout fiscal 2026 and into fiscal 2027”.
“That’s what we learned in Covid”
When it comes to pricing, Dell put in place “all the best practices” it learned during Covid but faster, Clarke said on the call, a transcript of which can be read here.
“We changed the entire pricing of our server business on December 10th in a couple of days,” he said.
“We had tens of thousands of open quotes in the PC business and changed them all on January 6th. This notion of we recover our cost – or two-thirds of it – in 90 days… we moved that quickly.
“That’s what we learned in Covid. That’s what we put in place here.
“We made list price changes across the board. We’ve changed – in our vernacular – our internal mechanisms around smart price and margin floors all changed instantaneously. We’re moving to discount off list price. We’re compressing discounting. Our quotes are valid for the shortest period of time they’ve ever been. We’re reducing promotions and all sorts of special pricing going forward. That’s what we’ve done.”
Dell booked $34.1bn in AI orders in Q4.
Its AI customer base now tops 4,000, Clarke said. He held up the growth it is seeing in AI across neoclouds, “sovereigns” and enterprise customers as “evidence that demand is broadening across all customer types”.
“We are gaining share in our PC business and strengthening ISG with strong margins in traditional servers and storage, all while positioning the company for the AI era. It was a monumental year,” he concluded.
