Acer Inc (宏碁), one of the world’s top three PC brands, yesterday said it had hired Colliers International to sell an under-used office building in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖).
The company’s board approved a proposal last December to sell the building. Based on an exchange filing on Dec. 13, it expected to sell the asset for NT$2.4 billion (US$83 million) to NT$3 billion based on initial estimates.
The auction is scheduled to be held on June 22, the company said in a statement.
The building was a property of handheld device maker E-Ten Information System Co (倚天), which Acer acquired in March 2008.
Acer plans to lease one floor of the building after the auction to continue housing the operations of its handheld devices division, which currently has more than 100 staff, the statement said.
In other news, Acer said it had moved into the world’s top three brands for projectors with a market share of 7.2 percent in the first quarter, citing the latest data released by US market researcher Pacific Media Associates.
It shows that Acer’s product diversification efforts are bearing fruit, the company said in a statement.
Acer, which recently started an organizational restructuring to diversify its focus from notebooks and desktops, saw projector shipments increase 19 percent in the first three months compared with the same period last year.
Worldwide shipments of projectors grew 13 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, making it the world’s third-largest supplier, the statement said. It didn’t give out rankings of rival companies.
Growth mainly came from rising sales to China, where its shipments surged 109 percent from last year.
The company had a 6.4 percent share in the worldwide projector market last year.
Acer, which dismissed former president and chief executive Gianfranco Lanci in late March, has said it wants to switch its focus to emerging mobile products — such as tablet PCs and smartphones — that could see exponential growth in the future.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF REPORTER LISA WANG
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