In China, Dell Clings Tightly to the Waning PC

After a year spent trying to take his namesake company private, Michael Dell closed his leveraged buyout on Oct. 29. Now he and his partner, private equity group Silver Lake Partners, are focused on turnaround strategies for the struggling PC maker. Dell is pushing higher-margin servers and other equipment for corporate data centers, yet it’s not downplaying PCs in every market. In China especially, Dell wants to build a franchise around them.

As it attempts to displace Lenovo as No. 1 in global PC sales, Dell plans to open about 2,000 new retail outlets—a 25 percent increase—in about 600 Chinese cities, says Peter Marrs, executive director and general manager of end-user computing for Asia. “It’s hugely important for us” to gain sales in PCs, says Jeff Clarke, Dell’s vice chairman and head of its PC and tablet business. “We had been retreating from lower-margin businesses,” he says. “We stopped retreating.”