Computer giant Acer Inc (宏碁) yesterday denied a newspaper report that said it planned to open a notebook personal computer plant in Brazil.
“The company has no information on that. Personally, I think it is unlikely,”Acer spokesman Henry Wang (汪島雄) said.
“It is totally unlikely that Acer plans to build a notebook PC plant in Brazil. If you say it is a desktop PC plant, that could be remotely likely, even though that is not being planned either,” he said.
Wang was responding to report in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo on Saturday, which said that Acer, after withdrawing from Brazil for 15 years, plans to return to local market and open a notebook PC plant.
The reason given was that Acer ships its notebook PCs and the smaller netbook PCs to Brazil via Paraguay and sells them at low price in Brazil, which has made its computers popular in Brazil.
However, Brazil has cut tariffs on information products and is offering incentives to retailers, which has made Acer’s transshipment through Paraguay unnecessary, Folha said.
Established in 1976, Acer has a worldwide staff of 5,000 employees. The company’s consolidated revenue for the first half of the year totaled NT$238.17 billion (US$7.3 billion), down 5 percent from NT$252.2 billion a year earlier.
After-tax profit fell 26 percent to NT$5.9 billion over the same period, Acer said on Aug. 27.
In 2007, Acer overtook Dell Inc and became the world’s No 2 notebook computer vendor after buying US computer maker Gateway in October of that year.
In the second quarter of this year it secured a market share of 20.1 percent, Gartner Inc’s data shows.
The Gateway purchase also helped Acer overtake Group Ltd (聯想) as the third-biggest personal computer maker in the world, with a market share of 13.5 percent in the second quarter.
Acer hopes to overtake Hewlett-Packard Co as the world’s leading laptop seller by 2011.
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