Case Write-up for “Matching Dell” Dell Computer Corporation, founded in 1984 by Michael Dell, has been growing through customized direct PC sales. From the beginning of their business, Dell had a direct strategy selling PC assemblies without distributer’s or retailer’s help. In the early 90’s, they tried to make sales through retailers but failed. After 1993, experiencing their first red letters in year-closing document, they have been focusing on customer oriented strategy and growing to the world’s biggest and most profitable firm in severe competing industry. Now Dell acquires reputations in every aspect of business including product development, supply chain management, lean manufacturing, and internet-based commerce and sales. How and why did the personal computer industry come to have such low average profitability? Since IBM released the open PC architecture, PC industry has been distributed and specialized. Most of components consisting of IBM clones have standard interfaces or protocols with each other and evolved via main processing unit which is revolutionized by Intel. Despite the technological improvements, severe competitions in the final PC market drive dramatic cost reductions of component makers and the development of large retailers and category killers also reinforce the high-volume, low-margin trend in the PC industry, shaping the industry as a well-known smile curve. Among many key success factors of Dell computer, the most revolutionary one is the reverse and simplification of value chain in the PC industry. As one can see at the [Exhibit 2], Dell pioneered the direct sales model for PC’s and constructed the most cost efficient and the fastest supply chain structure to win the orders. The traditional PC supply chain is consisted and sequenced of make-sell-service links, while Dell reversed the sequence to sell-make-service. In addition to reversing, Dell focused on manufacturing the final assemblies and processing orders and...