Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s No. 2 PC brand, yesterday announced the appointment of Jim Wong (翁建仁) as the new corporate president, with immediate effect. Wong replaced Gianfranco Lanci, whose abrupt resignation late last month shocked the tech industry.
Acer also announced the establishment of a new business group to dedicate resources to the development of tablet PCs to pursue the next star product.
Wong, 53, joined Acer in 1986. In 2001, he took charge of the IT products group and was a core member of Acer’s top management team. He was promoted to corporate senior vice president in 2005.
“For the past 10 years, Wong led Acer’s global IT operations, including product development and logistics,” Acer chairman and CEO J.T. Wang (王振堂) said in a company statement. “He has also worked closely with our regional operations to thoroughly understand the needs of marketing and channels at the front-end operations.”
In the PC business, Acer is set to continue seeking volume and shipment growth, the statement said, reversing its tone last month that said such growths had become incidental as profit margins and good brand positioning were far more important than global rankings.
“We must optimize multi-brand strategy by having clear differentiation of the brands’ positioning. Acer shall focus on developing selective models for mobile devices to lay a solid foundation for the future,” the statement said.
To achieve that goal, Acer restructured its IT product global operations into two independent groups.
The newly founded touch business group will focus on tablet PCs and smartphones, while the PC global operations group will continue promoting PC product lines.
Wong, who will lead the touch business, said that touch and mobile devices open up a host of new opportunities and they form Acer’s new business and growth engine for the future.
“To focus on this market, we saw the need to allocate sufficient resources and devise a new management structure different from the PC business,” Wong said.
PC global operations will be led by Campbell Kan (甘博隆), former vice president of the smart handheld business unit.
Acer also created three new offices to enhance its competitive development. They are the chief marketing office for brand position and marketing strategy; chief technology office, which is responsible for mid to long-term planning and technology integration; and operations analysis office for studying and analyzing company business models and financial affairs.
Separately, Acer said PC shipments in the second quarter could drop by about 10 percent from the first, citing such factors as recent company reorganization, inventory adjustment and seasonality.
As for operating margin, Acer expected it to be similar to the previous quarter.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts