3 Questions: Rudi Schmidleithner

CRN:

How many resellers does Acer America have now?

SCHMIDLEITHNER: Our distribution partners [in the third] quarter distributed to between 2,000 and 5,000 resellers. We just started implementing our business model. This year, we expect this to be doubling.

CRN: What are Acer America’s key product lines, and what is Acer doing to increase its channel presence?

SCHMIDLEITHNER: Our most important product is notebooks. We have the best product range in the industry. It’s also our fastest-growing product. Our resellers can make some money on notebooks. The [desktop] PC industry is more difficult to earn money in than notebooks. We see faster growth today—and an easier product for resellers to sell—in LCD monitors. It’s very little risk for a reseller to try an Acer product. It only costs a few hundred dollars, and nothing can be wrong with buying a nice LCD at a good price. With notebooks, if someone doesn’t know the company very well, they might hesitate a little bit. So we grow a little slower in notebooks, but faster in LCDs. … The target for this year is close to a million units for LCD monitors, and 80 percent of this will go through the reseller channel.

CRN: How is the entry-level server business for Acer?

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SCHMIDLEITHNER: We will not focus on this before the end of this year. We have some good customers and business partners who do business here with us in the U.S. and in other regions of the world, so we can maintain the business. It’s a project planned for the end of 2005, and in 2006, we will be more heavily in that business.

Click here for the full interview with Rudi Schmidleithner.