Acer Inc (宏碁) expects its laptop computer shipments to grow at a faster-than-expected rate of up to 40 percent at the most this year, the company said on Saturday.
This could help the Taiwanese PC company, the world’s No. 2 PC maker, to unseat its US rival Hewlett-Packard Co as the world’s largest notebook computer maker.
After seizing the No. 2 position from Dell Inc last year, Acer chairman Wang Jeng-tang (王振堂) reiterated the company’s target of becoming the world’s No. 1 manufacturer of notebook computers this year.
Wang told local TV broadcasters on the sidelines of the company’s annual employees’ party on Saturday in Wugu Township (五股), Taipei County, that Acer aimed to ship 45 million units this year, up 36 percent from last year’s 33 million units.
The new target is 12.5 percent higher than Acer’s previous goal of shipping 40 million units this year. The company has said it hoped to outgrow rivals in a booming PC industry this year, which Acer expects to grow by between 40 and 50 percent annually on accelerating PC replacement demand.
Chief executive officer and president Gianfranco Lanci said notebook shipments would grow by between 35 percent and 40 percent annually, instead of the 30 percent previously estimated.
Acer officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Wang said the company would closely monitor any ripple effect from the recent financial and credit crisis in some European countries, Chinese-language newspaper the Economic Daily News reported yesterday.
However, the company has not seen any impact yet, Wang said, adding that the most severely stricken countries, Portugal and Greece, accounted for a very small portion of Acer’s overall revenues, the paper reported.
Wang said customer demand was strong in the current quarter and support from its component and manufacturing partners would help it fulfill the growth.
Acer has not released its fourth-quarter earnings. The company earned NT$7.84 billion (US$244.3 million), or NT$2.98 per share, in the first three quarters of last year, down 12 percent from NT$8.93 billion in the same period of 2008, according to a company statement.
Revenues slipped slightly by 1 percent to NT$405.89 billion in the January-September period of last year, from NT$411.33 billion in the prior year.
Separately, Lanci said stronger-than-expected sales of its Android smartphone, named Liquid, have led to shortages of the device.
“Liquid is doing much better than our expectation,” Lanci said in an interview on Friday. “This is why we’re a little bit short of supply.”
The Liquid touch-screen handset, unveiled in October, competes against models from HTC Corp (宏達電), Samsung Electronics Co and Motorola Inc in the market for phones using Google Inc’s free Android platform. Acer expects its smartphone sales, including those using Microsoft Corp’s Windows system, to total between 2 million and 3 million units this year, Lanci said.
Acer expects to ship at least 250,000 Liquid handsets by the end of this quarter, compared with initial expectations for 150,000 to 200,000, Lanci said.
Smartphones will account for 10 percent of Acer’s revenue in about three years, one year later than initial company predictions because of last year’s global economic slump, he said.
Liquid is manufactured by Compal Communications Inc (華寶通訊), while Foxconn International Holdings Ltd (富士康) will make a second Android handset for Acer this quarter, Jim Wong (翁建仁), president of Acer’s IT Products division, said on Jan. 22.
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