When Dell founder convinced his parents to let him drop out of college using a financial statement

Michael Dell shared the first financial statement of his company dated July 31, 1984.

New Delhi: Can a financial statement help someone to convince parents to allow drop out from college? Well, some stories are meant to be.

Dell Technologies founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Michael Dell took to micro-blogging site Twitter to share an interesting trivia regarding his decision to drop out of college.

He shared the first financial statement of his company dated July 31, 1984. The statement shows a gross profit of USD 198,367.38 or a 22 percent rise in a single quarter. Dell added that the statement helped him convince his parents to allow him to drop out of college. His tweet has since been retweeted 5431 times and garnered 18,055 likes.

First financial statement for @Dell. The one I used to convince my parents that it was OK for me to not go back to college pic.twitter.com/kKuGDsyvYZ

— Michael Dell (@MichaelDell) March 18, 2018

Eventually, Dell dropped out the University of Texas in Austin at the age of 19.

The PC market, which Michael Dell helped shape by founding Dell in 1984 as a University pre-med freshman with USD 1,000 in savings, has remained stagnant due to the popularity of smart phones and tablets, shrinking by 0.2 percent in 2017, according to International Data Corporation.

The company’s net loss was USD 440 million, or USD 1.09 per share, in the quarter ended February 2, compared with a profit of USD 441 million, or USD 1.04 per share, a year earlier, mainly due to a tax charge of USD 970 million.

Excluding one-time items, the Palo Alto, California-based company earned USD 1.68 per share, while total revenue rose 13.6 percent to USD 2.31 billion.

Dell’s USD 52.5 billion debt pile is expected to become more burdensome this year because the U.S. tax reform enacted couple of months back caps a company’s ability to deduct interest expense to 30 percent of its annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation.