Acer Inc, the world's fifth-largest personal-computer (PC) vendor, said yesterday that it expects its notebook business to squeeze into the top five in the US market by the end of this year, company chairman Wang Jen-tang (王振堂) said yesterday.
"Acer's business in the US market is developing positively," Wang told a press conference before revealing the company's first-quarter earnings.
First-quarter earnings jumped 54.6 percent year-on-year to NT$2.15 billion (US$68.7 million), or NT$1.04 per share, on consolidated revenue of NT$65.71 billion, up 32.9 percent from a year ago. The company hoped to create an after-tax net income of NT$7.2 billion on consolidated revenue of NT$283.6 billion this year.
Acer was ranked the eighth largest laptop vendor in the US in the first quarter of the year, the company said, citing International Data Corp figures.
Acer returned to the US market in 2003 after suffering losses for years. The company hopes its re-entry to the US and China will help propel it into the top three in the world's PC arena in about two years.
It may require more time for Acer's notebook business to break into the top five in China following a management reshuffle earlier this month, Wang said.
Revenue in China is expected to grow to between US$300 million and US$400 million this year, from around US$250 million last year, he said.
The company's board yesterday approved a dividend of NT$2.90 per share, which is comprised of a NT$2.30 cash dividend and a NT$0.60 stock dividend.
"Acer is the company that could have the brightest outlook among the hardware players in Asia," said Kirk Yang (楊應超), head of Asian technology hardware research at Smith Barney Citigroup.
The execution power of Acer's management team is strong enough to allow the company to grab a bigger market share in the future, Yang said, adding that Acer is expected to perform well in the US market this year and to expand in China following the management restructuring.
Acer shares yesterday closed down 2.48 percent at NT$51.2 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Consolidation of the PC sector worldwide has been a hot topic since China's PC giant Lenovo Group (
"We are open on the merger-and-acquisition issues," Wang said, adding that the company would not make such a move unless it found an objective that would complement Acer's strength.
"We cannot see such companies in the market ... and we don't have any plan today," the executive said, dismissing market speculation that Acer might acquire Siemens AG's handset unit or Hewlett-Packard Co's less-than-lucrative PC business.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS