Ingram Micro Warns on Second Quarter

Easy on the PC rebound story.

Citing poor demand for its products, computer reseller Ingram Micro (IM) warned investors Wednesday that second-quarter sales and earnings would fall well short of forecasts. The company said that revenue for the period would come in between $5.8 billion and $6 billion, more than $200 million below the level analysts were looking for, according to Thomson Financial/First Call. The bottom line, meanwhile, would likely finish somewhere between break-even and a loss of $10 million, the company said. Analysts were expecting the company to earn 9 cents a share.

On the conference call following the warning, Ingram Micro CEO Kent Foster said that demand was weak across all geographies, but looked worst in the U.S., where May sales fell in the mid-20% range compared with last year. Sales were well below plan into early June, Foster said. He ventured to add that the company "may be seeing some stabilization."

Foster based that hypothesis -- which he stressed wasn't a prediction -- on the consistency of sales in the May-June period. "Up until that point," he said, "we'd not had a period where we'd felt we could even predict what might happen the next day. It was up and down and all over. But the past six weeks have been very stable in the U.S."

While not entirely unexpected, the news should serve as something of a caution to PC investors. Ingram Micro's large suppliers include Hewlett-Packard (HWP), Compaq (CPQ), Apple (AAPL) and IBM (IBM). Neither Dell (DELL) nor Gateway (GTW), both of which have fully direct sales models, use resellers.