Acer Inc is aiming to earn a US$20 million net profit from the US market alone this year, the company's CEO said.
This is the first time the world's No. 4 PC vendor by shipments has set a profit target for the US market. The move is part of the company's strategy to reduce its heavy reliance on the European market.
"We are very small in the US," Wang Jeng-tang (
Acer lags behind Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) in overall PC shipments, and holds only 3 percent of the market in the US. Sales there last year totaled US$1 billion.
But Wang believes now is the time for Acer to become more aggressive in the US market, and he aims to boost annual sales there to US$2 billion this year.
That would constitute 16 percent of Acer's global sales target for the year. And the US$20 million in net profit it hopes to achieve in the US would account for 6.5 percent of its total earnings projection for this year.
Wang said that working with national distributors such as Circuit City Stores Inc allowed Acer to sell computers at actual shops, rather than on the Internet as some of its rivals do.
"There are people who prefer to buy things from the stores," Wang said. "Distributors still play an important role in the market."
In contrast to Dell's direct sales model, Acer relies 100 percent on distributors to sell its computers.
But consumers can also buy Acer-branded computers through the Internet, since most distributors such as Circuit City also offer online shopping services, Wang said.
Currently, Acer's main customers are from the retail and small to medium-size corporate markets.
"When our annual sales in the US grow to US$3 billion-US$4 billion in the next two to three years, we will then tackle big corporate orders," Wang said.
He said the company is aiming to ship 15 million to 16 million computers worldwide this year and 25 million units next year, up from 9 million to 10 million units last year.
Meanwhile, it aims to lower its sales dependence on Europe to 50 percent from the current 60 percent-plus and to increase sales in the US, China and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.
"In the past 10 years or so, we never expected to make any profit from the US market," Wang said, adding that last year, Acer's US business was "above break-even point."
He said when the company first set foot in the US market, it still thought of itself as a manufacturer and it didn't handle after-sales services in a timely way. As a result, it was left with high inventory of computers with prices already falling by a third or more.
Aside from personal computers and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) monitors, Acer is considering selling LCD TVs in the US in the near future, Wang said. The company already sells LCD TVs in Europe, Australia and Taiwan.
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