Shares of Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) may have been caught in a serious merger tug-of-war between Michael Dell and Carl Icahn, but the PC-maker and IT services provider decided to release its earnings a week early. Dell’s revenue was $14.5 billion, flat on a year-over-year basis and versus $14.18 billion expected from Thomson Reuters. The company’s Enterprise Solutions, Software and Services revenue was up by 9% to $5.8 billion. Unfortunately, that signals further deterioration in its PC and peripheral business as this revenue segment was down by 5%.

The formal earnings results were $0.25 per share on a comparable basis, versus the Thomson Reuters consensus of $0.24 per share. On a GAAP basis, after options and other items, that was only $0.12 per share. The year-over-year numbers are atrocious on earnings: down 71% on GAAP earnings and down 50% on a non-GAAP comparable basis.

Dell calls it a challenging environment, and the growth segment is its Enterprise Solutions, Services and Software businesses. Here is where this merger gets bogged down by headlines around the PC business: quarterly cash flow from operations was $1.7 billion, but Dell ended the quarter with $13.9 billion in cash and investments, versus a $24 billion market cap.

Here is a breakdown of its operation sales:

• Enterprise Solutions Group revenue was $3.3 billion, an 8% increase. Operating income for the quarter was $137 million, a 9% decrease.
• Dell Services revenue was $2.1 billion, up 2%, driven by a 3% increase in support and deployment revenue and a 5% increase for infrastructure, cloud and security services revenue.
• Dell Software revenue was $310 million, and recorded an operating loss.
• End User Computing revenue was $9.1 billion in the quarter, a 5% decrease.

Where this gets interesting is that Dell is not offering any guidance, supposedly due to being in a merger agreement. What is interesting is that Thomson Reuters has estimates of $0.25 in earnings per share and $13.9 billion in sales for the next quarterly report. That compares to $0.39 EPS and $13.7 billion in sales from the same quarter a year earlier.

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