Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s fourth-largest PC maker, plans to roll out its latest lineup of smartphones and tablets next month, and to increase its marketing budget this year to promote the Acer Cloud computing platform and new Windows 8 PC products.
Acer president Jim Wong (翁建仁) yesterday told reporters at a corporate event that the new smartphone and tablet models — expected to be launched at the annual Computex trade fair in June — will be different from others to help the company win back customers.
“Hardware, software and cloud computing services are the major segments that we aim to upgrade this year,” Wong said.
“We are adopting new strategies to develop our products and services this year, and they all have one thing in common: thinking from the point of view of users to understand their need and make products that can win them over,” he said.
Wong said the firm remained confident that Windows 8 PCs are still in demand in global markets, as it has witnessed Microsoft Corp’s efforts to support its hardware partners.
Acer is planning to lift the shipment ratio of Windows 8 tablets to Android-supported tablets to 25:75 percent this year, from 10:90 percent last year, he said.
Asked whether the company plans to roll out a new Windows phone, Wong said Acer’s first Windows phone, Allegro, missed expectations and the company has no plans of launching a new model this year.
The company also plans to launch flagship products by the end of the third quarter, Wong said, adding that the company is seeking to increase the global penetration rate of its touch notebooks to between 30 and 35 percent in the second half of the year from 8 percent last quarter.
To promote its Acer Cloud computing platform, the company is focusing this year on the education market, such as schools in Vietnam and Thailand, he said.
Acer yesterday also reported that sales last month dropped 30.23 percent year-on-year to NT$28.1 billion (US$946.87 million). However, on a monthly basis, revenue rose 6.68 percent from January.
Accumulated sales during the first two months of the year fell 23.83 percent to NT$54.44 billion, from NT$71.48 billion during the same period last year.
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