Acer Reduces Notebook Shipment Forecast for Q3

Digitimes

This has been a tumultuous year for Acer, which saw CEO Gianfranco Lanci resign in March, reportedly over a difference of opinion with the company's board over the company's tablet strategy. Lanci was well respected within the channel and was credited for bringing the company into the position it once held as the world’s number two notebook maker.

With Lanci out, Acer undertook restructuring aimed at regaining traction in the mobile device market. They created a new division, known as the Touch Tablet group, with the goal of dedicating resources to tablets and smartphones. The group is led by Acer president Jim Wong, underscoring the importance of this new division within the company.

Acer in April launched its Android-based Iconia Tab A500, which features a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor with integrated GPU capability.

When Apple released the iPad in 2010, the market for mobile devices changed quickly. Sales of netbooks, which had been critical to Acer’s success in 2009, quickly diminished. By the fourth quarter of 2010, research firm Display Search was reporting that sales of non-iPad tablets, mini-notebooks and netbooks were down 14 percent year over year.

Just one year earlier, Acer overtook Dell to become the second largest notebook maker in the market.

Tablet woes go even further back for Acer. Eight years before Apple released the iPad, Acer got into the tablet game with a clamshell design. By 2004, with sales goals unmet and less applications than they would have liked, Acer admitted that the tablet PC was not yet a success. At the time they said that it would be years before the tablet caught on. Fast forward seven years, and Acer is apparently still having trouble figuring out tablets.