Shares of Acer Inc, the world's fourth-largest personal computer maker, rose yesterday after local press reported it was going to buy smaller European rival Packard Bell BV.
Acer's shares jumped 4.8 percent to close at NT$74.6 (US$2.30) on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
"We can't offer comments on the matter," Henry Wang (汪島雄), senior public relations director at Acer, said by telephone yesterday. "There may be some changes going on in the deal ? We can't guarantee when exactly we will be able to announce the details."
Citing sources from European channels, the Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily reported yesterday that the Taiwanese maker would make an announcement before September that it would buy Packard Bell, a private PC maker based in Wijchen, the Netherlands.
Packard Bell has a strong foothold in some European markets, including France, Portugal and the UK. These will complement Acer which is well established in markets such as Germany and Italy, the report said.
Packard Bell is currently the No. 3 player in the European consumer PC market and is also expanding into emerging markets in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, its Web site showed.
"The rumored buyout may balance Acer's portfolio in terms of the Asia-Pacific market," said Amy Teng (鄧雅君), an analyst at Gartner Inc.
In Asia, Acer is strong in the consumer sector as well as the small and medium-sized business sector, while Packard Bell has a presence in the commercial sector. A deal should therefore benefit the Taiwanese maker, she said.
Acer, which overtook China's Lenovo Group Ltd (
Acer chairman Wang Jeng-tang (王振堂) told investors in late April that the company was set to acquire a smaller firm in the PC industry within the next "three to five months," in a bid to maintain the firm's growth momentum.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained