Acer Announces New Plan to Regain Former Strength

PC maker Acer Inc.'s board of directors recently announced appointing co-founder George Huang as its new chairman, inaugurating an energetic cloud project, setting up the company's Pan Asia Pacific (PAP) headquarters, and raising the company's authorized capital to NT$40 billion (US$1.3 billion) from NT$30 billion (US$1 billion).

Huang takes over the new position from Stan Shih, the company's other co-founder. Shih stressed that he would not pass the chairmanship to Huang if the company had not turned healthier and is not likely to continue the recovery.

The company made a moderate profit of around NT$10 million (US$333,333) in the first quarter and is estimated to make NT$500-600 million (US$16.6-20 million) in the second quarter, with an all-time loss of NT$20.5 billion (US$683 million) last year.

The PAP headquarters will be steered by the company's senior vice president in charge of European operation, Oliver Ahrens.

The PAP headquarters oversees operations in Taiwan, China and the Asia Pacific, organized based on the company's Asia Pacific headquarters, whose top executive, Y.W. Lin, will retire this September.

The vacancy left by Ahrens will be filled by vice president for Acer Europe consumer business unit, Luca Rossi.

As part of the cloud project, the company will recruit 100 specialists in Taiwan and the United States knowledgeable about sales, applications, resources, education, medication, automobile, and telecommunications. The company has been vigorously developing the cloud-computing sector as part of its efforts to emerge from loss since Shih came out of retirement to re-steer the company last year. It has released a cloud application called “Build Your Own Cloud (BYOC)”.

While still feeling confident of Acer, the PC start-up that made its founder famous, Shih said the company still has a long way to go to regain its former glory.

In spite of the new measures and return to profitability, the institutional investor Nomura Securities has halved its target price for the company to only NT$10 per share in reflection of the investor's pessimism about the company's cloud plan. (KL)