HP-less PC market will drive up prices

A personal computing market without HP would likely drive up component prices, the chief executive of rival PC maker Dell has warned.

In a third-day keynote to Oracle's OpenWorld 2011 conference in San Francisco, Michael Dell said that while his company was definitely "not a PC business", it remained committed to hardware.

"It seems these days not everyone is so totally committed," he said.

"They used to say the computer is personal again. I guess you might take that personally if you bought some PCs from them."

The continuing rise of PCs in the market - set to reach two billion by 2014 despite competition from fragmented devices - meant end-user computers also accounted for the vast majority of component sales.

Dell said that 95 percent of global disk drive sales were for PCs.

HP's continued contemplation to sell its PC business would minimise the company's total buying power in the industry, Dell said.

"The client business provides really enormous scale and, if you give up that scale, you go from being one of the largest buyers in the world of those components to not really being in the top five or the top ten," he said.

"That's a huge problem; it means the price of those products has to be raised."

The warning continued Michael Dell's sustained attacks against HP in recent months for contemplating spinning off or selling its Personal Systems Group.

The PC business accounts for $US40 billion of the HP's revenue and the vendor has itself in recent times defended its position as the top PC supplier which, by itself, would account for a Fortune 60 company.

Despite continued executive changes and a newly-appointed CEO, a decision on the business' fate may not be made until the end of the year.

James Hutchinson travelled to OpenWorld 2011 in San Francisco as a guest of Oracle.