Dell’s official line is that last quarter’s overly-generous price cuts – which failed to bring the sales growth expected – were a one-off management failure that can be avoided in future. “We think we tested the limits of [price] elasticity, but that does not mean we are going back there,” says Joe Marengi, Dell’s head of North America.

Nevertheless, sales growth is not something Dell can afford to do without. “Forward momentum is what gives us economies of scale,” adds Mr Marengi, who aims to keep his factories at about 70 per cent of their capacity.

The company works harder than it might seem to generate business – concentrating on an aggressive telephone salesforce to target business clients rather than just waiting for retail customers to visit the online store. In one Austin call centre, the culture of a start-up shines through in a direct sales strategy that is far from passive. Wearing backward-facing baseball caps and telephone headsets, goateed salesmen bounce yo-yos and pace energetically in front of their desks while supervisors signal them to clinch the sale and move onto the next call.

“The basic business model is simple but there is lot more than meets the eye,” says Mr Marengi.

Within half an hour of a customer’s confirming their order, the parts needed are calculated and sent to the factory floor. Manufacturing and logistics costs have more than halved over the past three years – partly through volume efficiencies but also by shaving crucial minutes from the production process.

Since Dell suppliers are responsible for the cost of keeping a stock of parts on hand in the warehouse, and customers are billed once their PC emerges at the other end, the company’s only inventory overhead is the length of time it takes a computer to speed down the assembly line. The handful of minutes it takes to assemble a dozen or so key parts has been reduced by 60 seconds in the past year alone.

Downloading software and the operating system is now by far the longest part of the journey – up to 45 minutes on the “burn rack” before the data and power cables are automatically ripped out of the back of the machine by Dell’s impatient robots.

Engineers are even researching ways to do this more quickly, perhaps with wireless technology to magically bring the PCs to life as they snake their way round the factory floor.