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.
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