Supply Chain Issues

CF: What’s your view of how Dell has navigated the global supply chain issues?

CC: Personally I have a tremendous amount of respect for [Dell vice chairman and COO] Jeff [Clarke] and Kevin Brown [Dell’s executive VP for global operations and chief supply chain officer] and the Dell team that manages that. I think we’re the best in the business. If I’m humble enough, I think we showed up in ways that even exceeded our own expectations. Personally, with the most challenging, dynamic, fluid environment, our advantage is the scale of the company, the buying power and leverage and the relationships that we have with our suppliers. We just try and be as transparent and as honest with our customers and partners on realistic lead times as we can. Sometimes it’s not the news we want to give them. But we will be honest, and we will try and improve on those. But I think we showed up better than our competition. I honestly think that’s what’s helped us achieve some of the results that we did, in both unit shipments share gains, revenue gains — nobody would have envisioned that in one of the most difficult pandemic work experiences that we would be as busy as we were, and we’d be achieving historic results for the company. It’s pretty remarkable.

CF: And yet, despite your relationship and purchasing power with your suppliers, if they’re having issues, there’s only so much you can do in many cases.

CC: We’re struggling with some of the same global constraints that everybody is. We’re not immune. But I just think we have the ability through all those other things I referenced to be more responsive, more transparent and more flexible. I think it has served us well. And I think it has served our customers well.