Acer Goes Up

When you get to hear about a company going up, you think about a market share growth or an improvement of the services and products it has to offer to its customers, but when the truth is different, most chances are that you won’t get any good news…

Unfortunately, this is exactly the case with Acer, a Taiwan-based company which became by 2004 one of the world’s top five branded PC vendors. In its country of origin, Acerland, the retail chain of the company, is the second largest, coming right after Asus, but since the profits didn’t seem to be high enough, they just took a decision that doesn’t seem really right to me, but whatever - Acer is going to rise its prices!

According to Semmy Levit, UK country manager, Acer is looking to get more SKUs on the shelves of its partners, with higher prices. While the 17 and 20 inch notebooks seem to be the right tools to get more money from the customers, Acer is also trying to scoop up more SMB customers.

For some companies, a price increase is one of the last desperate measures before bankruptcy, but Acer is far from such a situation, since they got the top spot in the UK notebook sector in the fourth quarter, while managing to place on an honourable third position on the overall PC market.

Since Dell’s exploding laptops may be a catalyst to other’s success, it is good to know that Acer’s European marketing chief Gianpierro Morbello respects the competition, saying that it would be foolish to discount them - “Having problems for six months doesn’t mean you’re no longer a player in the market”.

On the other hand, it would be foolish for us not to notice that, while Dell is improving the services offered to its clients, Acer says that profit is not something to sacrifice - “Profit is the top priority in the strategy”. At this time, they may be right, but sooner or later, they may understand that the customer’s satisfaction should be placed above everything else.