Acer Inc, the nation's second largest laptop vendor, yesterday vowed to regain its one-time glory as No. 1 in its home market by the end of this year, through an enhanced marketing strategy and closer cooperation with its distribution and sales channels.
"Our laptop shipments to the local market soared by 80 percent from a year ago to over 10,000 units in March alone," Scott Lin (
"We are confident of regaining the No. 1 spot in the market this year ... with a sales target of around 200,000 notebooks in Taiwan," Lin said.
To accomplish the goal, the company plans to pour more money into marketing to further build up its brand identity.
It will also strengthen its alliance with non-information technology sales channels like FNAC and Carrefour by giving them more exclusive products as well as profit rebates, the executive added.
Asustek Computer (華碩) led Taiwan's laptop market with a 29.4 percent market share in the fourth quarter of last year, followed by Acer's 23.8 percent, Hewlett-Packard Taiwan's 14.1 percent, IBM Taiwan Corp's 12 percent and Toshiba Corp's 3.8 percent, according to figures from International Data Corp (IDC).
Acer yesterday rolled out its new model, TravelMate 3000, equipped with a 12.1-inch-wide screen and Intel Corp's latest Sonoma platform, the upgraded Centrino mobile technology, using the 1.73 GHz central processing unit, with a price tag of NT$49,900 per unit.
The company hopes to sell 5,000 units per month and win a 40 percent market share in the 12-inch laptop segment after spending NT$40 million to NT$50 million on marketing this year, Lin said.
The 12-inch laptop segment accounted for 27 percent of some 590,000 notebook shipments last year, up from a share of merely 12 percent in 2003, IDC analyst Sunny Chen (
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