Dell Is In Talks To Go Private

AP

Dell is in talks with several private equity firms to go private, according to Bloomberg News.

The stock is up 14% on the news.

Bloomberg tweets: "several large banks have already been contacted about financing an offer."

Dell had an awful Q3, when it missed analysts' expectations of $13.9 billion in revenues and $0.40 in earnings per share. The actual numbers: $13.7 billion in revenue and $0.39 in EPS.

Dell is suffering from a decline in consumer interest in PCs.

PC sales were down almost 5% during the holidays, according to Gartner.

"Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by 'cannibalising' PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs," Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa told Reuters.

"Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC."

The truth is, it's a post-consumer PC world, and Dell is a PC company.

Here's a chart from our presentation on the Death Of PCs that couldn't make it any clearer: