PC Retail

Not so long ago, Acer was seeing great success with larger screen, higher-spec laptops. Have you noticed much more emphasis on smaller 'netbooks' over the past few months and what do you think this means for the industry?
We still have great success with larger screens. Our unique 16-inch and 18-inch Aspire notebooks are strong sellers, but we also understand the demand for smaller devices such as netbooks, whether they be as a secondary system to the main notebook/ desktop at home or a primary system for a light user.

Netbooks are an exciting opportunity for the industry, providing they are marketed in the correct way. Acer is investing heavily in terms of marketing the Aspire One, both on our own and with key partners, to ensure the message going to the end customer is clear – a netbook does not replace your PC.

We see netbooks as mobile internet devices that are great at providing mobile connectivity, but they will not handle all the things people want to do on their main PC as they were never designed for such tasks. I think the simplest way to position a netbook is that it is designed for content consumption not content creation.

How much more demand for laptops in general have you noticed in the last year?
Demand is still strong for notebooks, year-on-year the second quarter of this year showed well over 50 per cent growth for notebooks, compared with half that for the overall PC market. For Acer in particular, we are seeing more demand at towards the £399 – £499 price points and the £699 – £899 price points, something we attribute to the introduction of the Gemstone Blue product range.

How does this compare to your desktop sales?
Desktop is still a growing category for Acer and it was a category we decided to invest in a few years ago which was not the trend at the time; this strategy has paid off. In the second quarter of this year we were one of two brands to grow their desktop market share year-on-year in a market which is shrinking. If you look at consumer desktops only, Acer is the number one choice, and we feel our offering supports this. Only recently did we launch a new gaming rig, The Predator, illustrating our continued support for this market and the resellers that serve it.

Would you say more and more people are migrating to laptops?
Do you see a point in the future where laptops replace desktops entirely? There is no doubt that people are moving to notebooks from desktops, and this is a market evolution which Acer predicted back in 2001.

Notebooks are capable of carrying out all but the most intensive tasks and are therefore becoming the primary devices for many consumers. We do not foresee desktops (in some guise) being completely replaced by notebook, as they still offer some physical benefits that notebooks cannot offer. Notebooks are limited by a screen size versus portability trade-off; once you get to a certain size, it is difficult to still consider it a mobile device. I think we approached that level with 20-inch screens.

For businesses, having a system that is not portable is an important safety feature, so they will continue to demand some type of fixed system. The users who demand the absolute top performance are also likely to stay with desktops, purely because high-performance is an energy intensive activity which drains notebook batteries, eliminating their benefits as a portable device.

What would you say differentiates Acer from the other big PC vendors?
The fundamental difference is the business model. If you look at the top three brands worldwide, Acer is the only one that does not sell direct to the end user; we put all our business through our partners. So when we say that we have grown ahead of the market, we are also saying that our partners have grown ahead of the market, and this is a really important message for resellers.

How do you think the UK PC market compares to the rest of EMEA at the moment?
The UK is one of the most mature PC markets in EMEA, and it is also the largest. It has some of the strongest competition, both between IT brands and between the retailers, which all combines to give the end-user some of the best choice. In terms of market growth, we are on a par with EMEA for notebooks but desktops are declining in the UK, whereas in EMEA the market is flat, partly driven by stronger growth in the emerging PC markets.

Acer's position as the number one notebook brand in EMEA is helping us to achieve some strong results in many of the key countries and we will see notebook and netbooks become an increasingly important factor in achieving growth in the market.

Any plans for expansion? What can we expect from Acer in 2009?
Acer always has plans for expansion. To survive in the current PC market, volume is essential to drive the economies of scale and the relevance in the market. On the product side of the business, we are not able to go into anything in detail, but suffice to say we will continue to strive to bring the latest technology to market first and this will include all the product categories we work in. The way we do business will also not change, we are a channel friendly vendor and will continue to be one.

What do you make of the growing interest in open source operating systems such as Linux?
The growing interest is driven partly by the changing usage of the customer and partly by brands wanting to add more value to the end user experience. More and more people are using the internet to look for information, to keep in touch with friends and family, and to share content.

This means the web becomes the primary interface of the system, not Windows, so actually, the job of the interface is to make accessing the web and all the other frequently used applications as simple as possible, and that is what we have aimed for, and achieved, on the Aspire One.