Dell didn’t report profits that were up to expectations in its last fiscal quarter. Dell has announced its earnings reports for fiscal Q3 and reports that revenue is down slightly due to decreased global IT spending. At the same time, Dell is cutting costs, mostly in the form of layoffs and plant closures, of 11% year-over-year in operating expenses.

Quarterly results improved with earnings per share growing by 9% to 37 cents per share with revenue of $15.2 billion. Despite that, Dell revenue was down overall 3% despite the fact that unit shipments grew by 3%. Operating income for Dell improved 22% to $1 billion with gross margins of 18.8%.

“Our business model adapts quickly to economic changes, even the kind of significant challenge we saw in the third quarter,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO. “We increased profitability with an improved mix of products and services – more than a third of our revenue and profit now comes from servers, storage, services and software and peripherals – and benefited from initiatives to improve our competiveness, including tight cost controls."

Via Dell