Acer Inc (宏碁) is mulling launching smart-home devices under its brand name next year, as part of the company’s strategy to grab a slice of the Internet of Things (IoT) consumer electronics market, a company executive said yesterday.
“We’ve been introducing IoT products for enterprise use in the past year and now we are thinking of extending the reach to end users in the consumer electronics market,” Acer Build Your Own Cloud (BYOC) general manager Robert Wang (王定愷) told reporters on the sidelines of this year’s Asia-Pacific ICT Alliance Awards ceremony in Taipei.
Home security-related products and cloud-enabled automatic control systems for household use would be Acer’s initial focus in the smart-home market, Wang said.
He said Acer does not plan to introduce smart-home appliances for the time being, as most home appliance vendors have strong ties with consumers.
“It would be challenging for Acer to enter the home appliance market,” he said.
Wang said Acer’s IoT smart-home devices could be introduced to the market under the company’s own brand or be cobranded with a strategic partner.
Acer’s BYOC business unit has been cooperating with many start-ups in the past year, with the unit offering a cloud-computing platform for the firms to develop IoT products and store data.
“We might take it a step further and launch IoT products together [with the start-ups] … We have not reached a conclusion on potential partners yet,” he said.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month, Acer is to invite its strategic partners to jointly showcase a variety of smart-home applications, Wang said.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in February, Acer is to display a wide range of cloud-computing applications for the home and office, and the retail and automobile sectors, he said.
Compared with its Taiwanese peer Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), Acer has been relatively slow in entering the smart-home devices business, mainly because its previous focus was on cloud-computing applications for enterprise use.
This year, Acer launched the abPBX, a communication network system that integrates a traditional telephone system with mobile devices, and the aBeing One, a mini computer that enables individuals to develop IoT products.
On Nov. 28, the first day of Taipei’s annual IT Month, the PC maker launched the Cloud Professor (雲教授) — a tool kit that contains an Arduino board and accessories that allows children to develop simple IoT products.
Declining to disclose the number of shipments, Wang said those products have been well-received by the market.
When asked when Acer BYOC, the business unit that it established two years ago, would become profitable, Wang said: “A new business unit requires time to develop its scale. It is not the time to focus on its revenue performance.”
“It requires time. Look at Facebook [Inc], it did not boom in a short period of time,” he said.
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