Dell Inc. doesn’t report its finances these days, but its parent company Denal Holding Inc. does, and its latest figures show that the IT giant had an unremarkable fiscal first quarter of 2017. Denali reported its revenues dropped by three percent year on year to $12.6 billion, although it did manage to greatly reduce operating losses to $161 million, down from $335 million a year ago.

Although the figures are from Denali, a company official explained during a June 6 earnings conference call that its and Dell’s finances are basically one and the same. Denali is the holding company that operates the privately owned Dell.

Denali said its losses were partly due to it burning through $63 million in cash in the first three months of the year. It wasn’t helped by what it called “seasonally low” cash generation throughout this period.

Of the cash it did make, Denali revealed that most came from PCs, which has long been its biggest cash cow. The firm’s Client Solutions group raked in $8.6 billion in sales for the quarter, down three percent from a year ago. Nonetheless, the group pulled in an operating income of $385 million for the quarter, up 76 percent from a year before.

How did Denali do this? Apparently, much of the growth was seen in strong notebook sales, as well as substantial growth in ancillary products and services, Denali said. Improved costs were another factor, the company claimed.

Another key cash cow for Denali is its enterprise hardware business, which also saw revenues decline, by two percent to $3.6 billion. Meanwhile, income from ops also fell, by 20 percent to $192 million. Denali said the decline could be attributed to recruitment of new sales staff and “solutions that position the company to address customers’ critical IT needs in the data center.”

“Storage revenue declined by 2 percent in the quarter and was primarily impacted by a weaker traditional storage market,” said Tom Sweet, Denali’s chief financial officer, said during the June 10 earnings call. “Similar to the rest of the industry, we are responding to a shift in trends as customers transition from traditional direct-attached disk drives to next-gen storage technologies, such as all-flash, software-defined, converged and hyperconverged solutions.”

One bright spot for the company was Dell’s Storage SC product line, which saw strong year-on-year revenue growth.

Last but not least, Dell’s software group reported flat revenues of $334 million, with an operating income of $28 million. The group’s operating losses ($100 million) declined nicely compared to the year before ($161 million in Q1, 2015, but were still worse than Dell’s initial forecast. These losses were blamed on higher operating costs of $90 million due to the pending EMC acquisition, as well as a dip in total sales.

“Dell is holding pretty steady in its market share for data center infrastructure — actually, it has been nudging up slightly — and for the cloud infrastructure segment of the market, its market share has also been relatively stable. Despite increased levels of competition, Dell is doing OK,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, said in an interview with eWEEK.