Acer Reinventing Itself as a Cloud Company
Acer hasn’t had stellar profits as of late. In fact, some estimates show that the company lost almost $400M last year alone. Acer is trying to turn this around by shifting out of the personal computer market and moving toward becoming a SaaS provider for the cloud. Just a couple of years ago (2010), Acer had peaked in terms of popularity. The low cost laptops they were selling gave the company brand name recognition.
Since 2010 though, Acer seems to have fallen behind on consumer electronics. Acer was late getting into the personal handheld touchscreen market as well mobile phones. Acer does not have large corporate contracts like their competitors Lenovo and Dell. Research shows that global PC consumption will continue to drop as more companies begin to move to the cloud platform. With this new focus on the cloud, it is apparent that Acer does not want to miss the ship again.
The release date for this cloud platform is April 1st 2014. Acer currently operates a cloud platform called AcerCloud which allows users to sync media across all of their devices. The name should stay the same yet AcerCloud should have some additional functionality added that was not specified in press releases regarding the cloud service.
Acer looks to gain a competitive advantage as they have had some major shakeups on the executive committee. For example, J.T. Wang was a long time chief executive of Acer and he recently tendered his resignation. This prompted the board to bring in Jason Chen. Chen is a leader in Taiwanese business and he is known for his innovation in the semiconductor field. Chen speculates that Acer’s move to the cloud will be the catalyst which will turn this company into a profitable one. In regards to Acer’s past, Chen said, “With Ultrabooks and touch pads, I don’t think Acer’s direction was wrong. The company just invested too early.”
