Acer Inc (宏碁) founder Stan Shih (施振榮) yesterday said that he is not worried about a decline in PC shipments of the Taiwanese computer maker last year because the company is on track to turn its business around.
“I’m not worried about it. I believe we will hold steady on shipments,” Shih said on the sidelines of a media event to announce partnerships among three local companies and his own foundation — Stan’s Foundation — to promote new business models for Chinese-language markets.
“We have pursued volume in the past and suffered losses. Now we intend to strengthen our earnings and confidence first, and look to business growth in the long term,” Shih said.
Although Acer plans to focus on several “competitive” product categories in the current stage, the company still hopes to expand its PC offerings in a bid to monetize from its Build Your Own Cloud (BYOC) business in the future, he said.
BYOC is an Acer system that allows users to put together cloud services to manage digital files like music and photographs across Acer PCs and mobile devices.
According to data research firm International Data Corp, Acer remained the world’s fourth-largest PC maker last year, with a 7.8 percent market share, but the company’s shipments fell by 1.6 percent year-on-year to 24.1 million units — the only one among the top five manufacturers to record an annual decline.
At a global news conference in New York on Thursday last week, Acer unveiled a full range of devices for the back-to-school season, including two 2-in-1 notebooks, an 11-inch convertible laptop with a 360-degree hinge, three mainstream notebooks, a 15-inch Chromebook with 11.5 hours of battery life and two tablets.
As part of its new communication device business, Acer also showed a prototype of its new touch phone running on the company’s cloud-based “abPBX plus” telephony network.
With features such as instant messaging and real-time news and announcement relays, Acer said the new touch phone can boost office workers’ productivity.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last