Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s No. 4 PC vendor, yesterday said it was unfazed by the new joint venture to be set up by rival Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) and contract manufacturing partner Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶), saying that “the industry has too much idle production capacity.”
“We are not worried because there are a lot of production facilities that are yet to be fully utilized,” Acer chief marketing officer Scott Lin (林顯郎) said.
Citing visits to Chinese facilities of contract partners such as Compal and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Lin said these production facilities outshone one another in size and contract makers had more capacity to digest amid slumps in notebook sales this year.
If those facilities were running at full steam, then Acer would be pressured, given that Compal might favor Lenovo because it was setting up a US$300 million manufacturing venture with the company, Lin told reporters yesterday on the sidelines of a product launch.
Compal and Lenovo on Tuesday announced their manufacturing venture in Hefei in China’s Anhui Province, which is slated for mass production at the end of next year to make Lenovo notebooks, all-in-one PCs and related components.
Lin also said that, as one firm was a contract maker and the other a brand-focused enterprise, it might cause some hiccups in the organizational integration process.
The rivalry between Acer and Lenovo intensified when Lenovo recently hired Acer’s former CEO Gianfranco Lanci as its “global consultant” to help expand global consumer business, with a primary focus on the integration of Medion AG, a German PC maker recently acquired by Lenovo.
However, Lin brushed off concerns that the move may jeopardize Acer’s operations, saying that a key executive must be fully empowered by the board to make a significant impact on the business.
“Acer’s board gave 100 percent power to Lanci in the past. We are not sure if that will be the case at Lenovo,” he said.
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