"A lot of this comes down to expectations that are too high," said Kevin Hunt, a Wall Street analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners. "You look at some of these companies and they have 15 percent growth, which isn't bad, but they were expecting 25 or whatever, which is why they get hit so hard.
"The general trend of business is still OK and trending up," Hunt said.
Still, Wolf warned against reading too much into the Dell announcement. Of the US$0.02 above previous forecasts, Wolf said: "one penny of that upside is due to a lower tax rate, deriving a higher percentage of its revenues from the international market.
"A second penny was the result of better margins" based largely on a drop in the price of component parts, Wolf said. "If there had been stronger revenues, that would have been a much more positive signal."
Shares of Dell rose US$0.55 to close at US$35.42 on Friday. Dell's announcement came just before the start of the company's annual shareholders meeting in Austin, Texas. At the meeting, Kevin Rollins took over as chief executive, replacing the company's founder, Michael Dell.
"Today's change is one of title, not of roles and responsibilities," Dell told shareholders according to a Reuters news report. Dell, who founded the company in 1984, remains as the company's board chairman.
The company had previously announced its intentions to promote Rollins.
Also on Friday shareholders narrowly rejected a resolution calling on the company to treat employee stock options as a normal business expense. In recent months, shareholders at Intel, the Hewlett-Packard Co. and PeopleSoft have passed similar resolutions. Stockholders of Apple did so last year.
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