Taiwanese computer vendor Acer Inc will go ahead with the purchase of Paris-based PC maker Packard Bell through US group Gateway, which it recently bid for, Acer's president said yesterday in Madrid.
"Packard Bell will reinforce our position in Europe where we are already well positioned," Acer president Gianfranco Lanci told a news conference in Madrid.
Lanci said Acer had already signed an agreement with the owner of Packard Bell, John Hui (
The amount on the table for Packard Bell "is relatively small" compared to the US$710 million that Acer offered for Gateway at the beginning of the month, he said.
Acer's bid for Gateway is expected to be completed next month, he said.
The integration of Packard Bell and Gateway will create a firm with a yearly turnover of US$20 billion and annual sales of nearly 25 million computers.
The new firm will post 48 percent of its sales in Europe, 34 percent in North America and the remaining 18 percent in Asia.
The acquisition of Packard Bell will boost Acer's position in the market for office computers, one of its weak spots, Lanci said.
Acer will integrate the two new firms "very, very quickly" and plans to pursue a multi-brand strategy to respond to an increasingly segmented market, Lanci said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS