Tonight:
2°c
Dell shareholders refuse to back company's founder
18 Aug 2010More than a quarter of Dell's shareholders have refused to support the re-election of chief executive and founder Michael Dell to the company's board.
Dell disclosed in a regulatory filing that 25.1% of the votes, or 377.8 million of 1.5 billion votes, withheld their support for the chief executive and chairman in a company annual meeting last Thursday.
Michael Dell received the lowest number of votes of all 11 directors re-elected.
Dell, once the world's largest personal computer vendor, has dropped behind Hewlett-Packard and Acer. The company has ceded market share rather than engage in price wars that would further pinch margins.
Its shares have fallen more than 13% in the last year while the Nasdaq has risen more than 14%.
The company has made a mix of major and small acquisitions in the last year as it tries to diversify beyond personal computers. This week it said it had agreed to pay $1.15 billion (£739 million) to buy 3PAR, a data storage company.
