Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE:DELL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 2 of 11

Tom Sweet: David, happy to sort of elaborate on that. Obviously, as we look at the environment, it’s pretty early in our planning process from a fiscal year €˜24 perspective. Clearly, the landscape and the dynamics are complex, and there’s a high degree of complexity out there, whether it’s around inflation or interest rates, what’s going on with FX, global growth in general, supply chain, geopolitical. I could probably go on, but you get the point that at this point, there’s — as we look at it, there’s a pretty wide range of financial outcomes depending upon how some of these things move and change on us. And in particular, I would say the back half of next year continues to be — has a fair amount of complexity. So, Chuck mentioned that we do see customers with a bit of cautiousness in their spend right now.

I think that’s pretty evident. And so that said, we’re going to focus on what we can control, meaning we’ll focus on ensuring we help our customers as well as ensuring we manage the P&L properly, both — and be tight on both spending and customer satisfaction. And just a reminder, I would highlight that from a spend perspective, we’ve been focused on spend now for a number of quarters as we have restrained hiring and put other cost control measures in place. But having said all of that, what I was trying to elaborate while I don’t want to get into exactly what next year looks like because we’re still working our way through it, we do think it’s going to — it’s got some complexity and some challenges to it. And as a result of that, if you took sort of the midpoint of our guide and then ran historic — normal historical sequential, say over a couple of — two-year historicals and maybe hair cut those a bit, I think you’re going to be in the ballpark of what our current thinking is, recognizing that’s going to continue to evolve and change over the coming months.

Maybe the other data point to help you triangulate on that is if you look at P&L revenue growth in the back half of fiscal €˜23. So obviously, the minus 6 that we just printed for Q3, at the midpoint, minus 16 of our Q4 guide sort of points to a minus 10, minus 11 sort of growth rate, and that’s probably something you ought to think about as you do that math.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Tim Long with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Tim Long: I was hoping to dig a little deeper into CSG. Obviously, in the guide, that sounds like it’s a little bit more challenged of the market. I think you mentioned ASPs were up in the Q3. So can you talk a little bit about kind of where we are with channel inventory in commercial and consumer? What you see going on in the pricing and what impact that will have in margin? And maybe if you could just throw in what’s going on with your backlog. I’m sure it’s being worked down as well. It’s probably multiple parter there, but I think you get the gist. Thank you.

Page 2 of 11