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Acer aims to further expand European market share

An Acer employee displays a limited-production low-price laptop priced at NT$19,990 on the opening day of the Info Multimedia Taipei trade expo in Exhibition Hall 1 of the Taipei World Trade Center. The event will run through Monday. Acer's laptop shipments rose about 45 percent in Europe in the first quarter of the year, Gartner Inc estimates show. PHOTO: CHO YI-CHUN, TAIPEI TIMES

Acer Inc, which overtook Dell Inc as the second-largest computer supplier in Europe this year, aims to expand its market share in the region by pushing laptop sales, European marketing director Gianpiero Morbello said.

"In the notebook segment, we're already number one with 20 percent market share in Europe," Morbello said in a telephone interview from his Milan office on Thursday. "I think we'll be able to add a few more percentage points."

Acer is taking advantage of the growing popularity of Internet-enabled laptops that fueled a 13 percent jump in overall personal computer shipments in the region in the first quarter.

The Taipei-based company reorganized its European unit along client groups and focused on selling through dealers and retailers rather than directly to customers to help lower costs.

Acer's first-quarter European laptop shipments rose about 45 percent to 1.8 million units from a year earlier, the company said, citing Gartner Inc estimates. Including all types of personal computers, shipments gained 44 percent to 2.4 million units, trailing Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard Co, which sold 3.7 million units in the period.

Overall PC market growth in Europe probably slowed "slightly" to about 10 percent in the second quarter, and will accelerate toward 15 percent by end of the year, Morbello said.

Shares of Acer yesterday rose 0.3 percent to close at NT$68.50 in Taipei, after rising as much as 1.3 percent. The company has a market value of NT$160 billion (US$4.9 billion).

On a global basis, Acer overtook China's Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) in the first quarter to become the world's third-biggest PC supplier, following Hewlett-Packard and Dell, Gartner said. Acer chairman Wang Jen-tang (王振堂) told investors on April 27 the company plans to buy a small personal-computer maker in as little as three months.
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