I guess Acer sure does know that hardware is a tough nut to crack. The fourth largest PC maker in the world has had a disastrous few months, and as a result has recently announced a number of changes going forward.
You may recall that Acer was the biggest critic of Microsoft’s move into the hardware domain, with several senior company executives publicly decrying Redmond’s plans to release the Surface tablets.
CEO J.T. Wang was among them, and he is now set to retire from Acer at the start of 2014. President Jim Wong will instead take over the CEO duties from January 1. Wang will, however, remain chairman of Acer until his tenure concludes towards the end of June, next year.
Additionally, the company has also revealed that it is dealing with a bigger loss for the third quarter of the year. The Taiwan based company posted a total loss of $446 million for the July to September quarter. This makes it the fifth time since 2011 that the company has posted quarterly losses.
Not just that. Acer has also announced that it plans to lay off seven percent of the company’s 8,000 employees, a move that the company says will save it $100 million in the next year.
The company surely is going through a dark phase — perhaps the darkest in its short history.
Supply chain sources indicate that Acer managed to sell only 1.4 million units of notebooks, a stark decline of 10 percent the month over. Interestingly, this fall is primarily attributed to labor shortages in China. And obviously, weak demand from retail channels has also played its part.
But talk about Acer almost always warrants a mention of Asus.
For comparison’s sake, Asus managed to achieve a 30 percent growth compared to the previous month. This success is largely attributed to the launch of newer models like the Transformer Book T100 and other non-touchscreen laptops.
All Comments
Acer only has themselves to blame. Microsoft should not have been the only company working hard to push Windows and Windows RT. They should not have been the only ones producing exceptional hardware. They should have been making high-quality, affordable devices and really putting some muscle behind then. Everyone left Microsoft to do all the heavy lifting but blame them when the industry overall doesn’t have success.
Bada bing!!