By Damon Poeter, ChannelWeb, June 21, 2010, 1230 hrs
Acer may trail Hewlett-Packard (HP) in terms of global PC shipments at the moment, but Chairman JT Wang told shareholders recently that his company would seize the top spot before the year is out, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
“We have responded faster than our competitors to the demand in the market,” Wang said at an Acer shareholder meeting in Taipei, according to the Journal. “We are one of a very few that is able to respond to the market when demand stabilized in the latter part of the second quarter because we were prepared.”
Buttressed by charts that showed Acer’s rise from less than 4 percent of global PC market share in 2003 to its current position with 14.1 percent, Wang told shareholders the computer maker expects its third-quarter revenue to increase between 10 and 15 percent from the current fiscal quarter.
Acer had sales of $5.2 billion in the first quarter of 2010.
The Taipei-based company already edged past HP in that quarter to become the world’s largest notebook supplier, with 9.49 million units shipped, or 19.6 percent market share, to HP’s 9.47 million units, according to industry researcher Gartner. Acer still trails HP in total PCs shipped, but Wang said his company anticipates shipping 10 million desktops in 2010, about 2 million more units than it did in 2009.
All told, Wang said Acer could increase its total global PC shipments by as much as 50 percent in 2010 as compared to the previous year. Having passed Dell in 2009 to become the second largest computer manufacturer in the world, Acer now has its sights set on HP and its roughly 18 percent share of the global PC market.
Regionally, Acer held the No. 1 market share position in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the first quarter, both in total PC shipments (21.5 percent) and notebook shipments (26.0 percent), with HP in the second slot in both categories, according to Gartner. Acer was third, behind HP and Dell, in first-quarter shipments of PCs to US market, and trailed Lenovo, HP and Dell in the Asia-Pacific market.
Acer also detailed to shareholders its key initiatives for the next couple of quarters. The company will be making a major push of its consumer brands into China and Brazil, and is also planning to introduce new commercial products, including servers and storage systems, in the months to come.
Most intriguing, Acer said it will be releasing four new smartphones based on its own user interface by the third quarter, while also introducing a new series of mobile Internet devices (MIDs) in that timeframe. |