The company also delivered a downbeat outlook predicting that its sales and gross profit margins would continue to be pressured amid a challenging economic environment.
Michael Mace, Palm's vice president for product planning and strategy, said Palm recognized that its profit margins and market share in hardware would continue to decline as competitors introduced products.
Mr. Marshall, the analyst, remained skeptical that Dell would continue to improve its profit margin because such a large portion of its business is selling low-margin personal computers.
But analysts were nervous about the company saying margins had fallen after two years of growth, and would continue to do so in 2013.
The buyers found lenders only too willing to finance as much as 90percentt or more of the purchase price, even as profit margins shrank, on a bet that rents and values would continue to rise.
But she insisted that Trinity is running at a 30% net margin and that by achieving its stretching but realistic targets, Trinity would continue to make digital a substantial part of the company's revenue and profitability.
It said on Thursday it would continue to discount the PlayBook and anticipated a gross profit margin of only 1 percent on the devices in this quarter.
And, the merchants say, the business models for their own stores assumed that low-cost labor would continue, so concessions to their workers threaten already slim profit margins.
Mr. Haas said that Dell would continue to focus on S.M.B.'s, which generally produce higher profit margins for Dell than the consumer or giant corporation sectors.
He said that Toyota would continue to expand sales of cars made outside Japan, as well as models with higher profit margins.
