Acer UK Ltd - Consumer Electronics -
United Kingdom
Acer UK Ltd
Strategic Direction
·
Acer is aiming to grow its
notebook sales to become the leading global manufacturer in that market and
consolidate that position.
·
As of late 2008, Acer was on
course to achieve this target, having passed Hewlett-Packard to become the
global market leader in notebook sales. In the UK, however, its position is
still slightly weaker than in the rest of Europe and the company will be
looking to improve it by adopting a more coherent marketing strategy and
developing its products with the strongest reputations.
·
Acer faces extremely tough
competition from the other two computer giants, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, who
lead Acer in the overall rankings in the global and UK computer markets. Sales
in the UK have dipped slightly as Acer does not have the brand recognition of
Hewlett-Packard or Dell, although it is still evidently a major player.
Key Facts
|
Full name
of company:
|
Acer UK Ltd
|
|
Address:
|
Acer House,
Heathrow Boulevard III, 282 Bath Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 0DQ
|
|
Tel:
|
(+44) 870
853 1000
|
|
Fax:
|
(+44) 870
853 1004
|
|
www:
|
www.acer.co.uk
|
|
Activities:
|
Computer
manufacturing
|
Source: Euromonitor International from
company reports, trade press
|
|
2007
|
|
Net sales
(£ million)
|
7,114.2
|
|
Net profit
(£ million)
|
199.5
|
|
Number of
employees
|
5,400
|
Source: Trade press, company research
Company Background
·
Acer UK Ltd is the UK arm of
Acer Incorporated, a public company registered in Taiwan.
·
The company was founded in 1976
under the name Multitech, and it originally sold electronic components and
acted as a consultant on microprocessor technologies.
·
In 1987 the company expanded to
11 employees and changed its name to Acer before beginning to manufacture computers.
It later acquired Texas Instruments in 1997.
·
Acer maintains a global
presence with market leadership in 13 European countries and in India. In other
markets, such as Australia, the US and the UK, it is in third place overall.
·
Acer’s recent strategy has been
to focus on marketing methods that best utilise its distribution channels, This
has manifested itself in such strategies as the collaboration with Ferrari’s
Formula 1 team to make a laptop that features the Ferrari logo prominently on
its case
·
The company is continuing to
contract its workforce in order to maximise margins.
·
Acer has a national
distribution network.
Production
·
Acer supplies the UK market
from abroad, importing most of its goods as it has outsourced most production
to its own manufacturing arm, Wistron Corporation. Wistron has a manufacturing
centre in Brno, Czech Republic, which supplies most of the European market for
Acer.
·
Wistron has offices and
manufacturing centres throughout the world, which supply Acer’s extensive market
including all of Asia, Europe, Australasia and North America. Wistron is one of
the top 20 manufacturing companies in Taiwan.
Competitive Positioning
·
Acer is purely a computer
manufacturer, which perhaps has more of a reputation for laptops in the UK, but
it also has a strong record in desktops. As with many leading computer
companies, this is not regarded as a narrow portfolio despite the concentration
on the computing sector to the exclusion of all other products. This obviously
reflects the particularly complex and competitive nature of computer design.
·
Acer maintains its position
across all market segments, but for the most part, like its competitors Dell
and Hewlett-Packard, its products are aimed at the middle market. It is
difficult to sustain leadership of any type in the computers sector without a
strong presence in the middle and low end of the market, since computers are
generally one of the more expensive products in consumer electronics.
·
The company’s market share in
consumer electronics as a whole was 0.16% in 2007, which put it in forty-fourth
position the overall list. In computers, however, Acer was in tenth place
overall and in laptops it held sixth place with a market share of 5.75%. This
is a disappointing performance by Acer’s global standards, and that is why the
company is focusing particularly on strengthening its position in the UK as its
weakest-performing European market.
·
Acer’s market share has in
general been stagnant, but it will be worried by its slight loss of share in
its flagship notebook market, from 5.80% in 2006 to 5.75% in 2007.
·
Although the company is an
innovative designer in its own right, it has also been accused of copying other
companies’ patents and designs in the past, which slightly dented its market
standing.
·
As a laptops specialist, Acer
will certainly hope to benefit from the forecast good health of that subsector.
Laptops are forecast to overtake desktops as the more popular computer purchase
in 2009 and already constituted 48.9% of the market by volume in 2008. With
this trend forecast to continue, Acer will no doubt see an opportunity to
increase its market share while its other competitors will tend to divide their
energies more between desktops and laptops.
|
Product
type
|
Volume
share (%)
|
Rank
|
|
Computers
|
2.64
|
10
|
|
Laptops
|
5.75
|
6
|
Source: Euromonitor International
