Dell defys industry gravity in Japan, proves sceptics wrong with web sales
Dell is thriving in Japan via its website sales, and has rapidly risen to the #5 position (overtaking IBM recently) with 7.7% of the $20 billion Japanese computer market, according to this New York Times story (registration required). While overall sales of PCs fell for the first time last year, Dell's profit grew 31% in the 3rd Quarter -- part of the reason was its strong performance in Asia where Dell sales will surpass Europe by 2003.
It was perhaps the biggest non-event in the history of Dell Computer. Hiroshi Hamada, the head of Dell's consumer computer sales unit in Japan, designed a Web site to supplement the company's fledgling telephone sales here. It was 1997, after all, and the Internet was fast becoming a viable sales channel in the United States.
...To almost everyone's surprise, Mr. Hamada's little project turned into a tsunami. With little advertising, 35 people ordered computers the first day, three times more than he had expected. In six months, customers were buying $500,000 of equipment a day on the site. Today, Dell books 80 percent of its consumer sales in Japan online, the highest rate of any country in which it operates.