It's a Saturday night in February, and 2,000-plus Acer employees have crammed into an exhibition center for the company's Lunar New Year party. As guests sit down to chestnut soup, steamed abalone, and double-boiled young chicken, a troupe of local comedians impersonates Acer executives.
Among the roasted is Gianfranco Lanci, the 55-year-old Italian who is the company's first non-Taiwanese CEO. His impersonator pastes a fake bald patch on the back of his head and mutters a few phrases in Italian, then switches to English. "In my opinion, Acer is already No. 1," the fake Lanci declares, taking a jab at Acer's aim to jump ahead of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) into the top position in the PC industry.
Lanci and Acer Chairman J.T. Wang aren't quite there yet, but they're getting closer. Acer now sells 13.4% of the world's PCs, ahead of Dell's (DELL) 12.4% but far behind HP's 21%. On Feb. 9 the company reported its biggest quarterly profit in almost three years, with earnings up 25% to $109 million. Shipments increased 28%, well ahead of the industry average of 15%, as consumers flock to Acer's inexpensive offerings.
This year, Acer hopes to grab the top spot in laptops. That shouldn't be hard: It's already the leader in netbooks--the small, low-cost machines it launched in 2008--and it's neck and neck with HP for all portable computers. Once Acer becomes No. 1 in that segment, Chairman Wang boasts, it won't be long before it dethrones the Americans. "Within two to three years we will be able to take the total PC No. 1 spot," he says. "Whether it's 2012 or 2013, it doesn't make too much difference to us." HP declined to comment about the chairman's audacious predictions.
Source: Newsbag | Bruce Einhorn and Tim Culpan
Comments |  RSS |
|
"Can you rewrite the article on this one particular and evaluate it towards the primary supply? Amazing way of thinking about it, but maybe I don't think of it that way."