Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s third-largest computer maker, doesn’t expect to maintain this year’s rate of sales growth in Germany next year, said Wilfried Thom, head of Acer’s consumer business in the country.
“We are having a really unbelievable year,” and sales are going up, Thom said on Friday in an interview at the IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin. “We don’t think we’ll have this kind of growth again next year, because both this year and last year we had strong growth.”
The company predicts sales will “consolidate” next year, he said. “That means that if you’re coming from 17 percent or 18 percent market share to 30 percent, it won’t continue to grow at the same pace.”
This week, the Taipei-based computer maker’s shares rose to a 3.5-year high in Taipei trading after it forecast laptop shipments may increase as much as 40 percent in the third quarter from the previous three months.
“At the moment the situation” for Acer in Germany “is much better than everybody expected six months ago,” Thom said. “The question is what happens in the third or fourth quarter, when unemployment is expected to rise.”
Currently, Acer has 19 percent of the overall notebook and netbook market in Germany, Thom said.
For consumer products overall, it has about one-third of the market, he said.
Acer’s business with companies has been much weaker than that with consumers. Recently, the number of government contracts for which Acer can bid has been growing, Thom said.
“There are a lot of offers we have to send out and that looks really good, but the private sector is still struggling,” he said.
Business-to-business sales makes up one third of Acer’s total revenue, Thom said.
UNCERTAINTIES: Exports surged 34.1% and private investment grew 7.03% to outpace expectations in the first half, although US tariffs could stall momentum The Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) yesterday raised its GDP growth forecast to 3.05 percent this year on a robust first-half performance, but warned that US tariff threats and external uncertainty could stall momentum in the second half of the year. “The first half proved exceptionally strong, allowing room for optimism,” CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “But the growth momentum may slow moving forward due to US tariffs.” The tariff threat poses definite downside risks, although the scale of the impact remains unclear given the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s policies, Lien said. Despite the headwinds, Taiwan is likely
READY TO BUY: Shortly after Nvidia announced the approval, Chinese firms scrambled to order the H20 GPUs, which the company must send to the US government for approval Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) late on Monday said the technology giant has won approval from US President Donald Trump’s administration to sell its advanced H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) used to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to China. The news came in a company blog post late on Monday and Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run China Global Television Network in remarks shown on X. “The US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the post said. “Today, I’m announcing that the US government has approved for us
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
The National Stabilization Fund (NSF, 國安基金) is to continue supporting local shares, as uncertainties in international politics and the economy could affect Taiwanese industries’ global deployment and corporate profits, as well as affect stock movement and investor confidence, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement yesterday. The NT$500 billion (US$17.1 billion) fund would remain active in the stock market as the US’ tariff measures have not yet been fully finalized, which would drive international capital flows and global supply chain restructuring, the ministry said after the a meeting of the fund’s steering committee. Along with ongoing geopolitical risks and an unfavorable