Jerry Kao of Acer holds a laptop computer at his company’s showroom in suburban Taipei on June 24, 2022.
Acer, the world’s fifth-largest PC maker by market share, has seen the pace of its orders slow as demand for work from home wanes and PC makers face supply chain disruptions.
But Acer is working on a solution, says Jerry Kao, the company’s chief operating officer. Acer aims to enhance its environmental credentials by selling laptops that are made from recycled materials and are easy to repair.
The pressure on demand for Acer computers became evident in the second quarter of this year after the “relatively good” January-March income, Kao says. Standard primary Revenue in the first quarter It reached $2.6 billion, up 9.5% year over year. Acer has not released second-quarter data yet.
“Right now, demand is really declining across all PC sectors,” Kao said in an interview. The second question is suddenly starting to change – many issues, the issue of war, the issues of contagion. I think all PC makers are still suffering.” He adds that some upstream components came late because they sourced in eastern China. Lockdowns earlier this year hit major business hubs in Shenzhen and Shanghai.
According to Kao and others, the surge in PC demand in 2020 and 2021, when home-bound consumers bought laptops for remote work and online education, fell across the industry.
Conventional PC shipments fell 5.1% in the first quarter, Market research firm IDC saysThe sector was “coming out of two years of double-digit growth”. IDC says sellers shipped more than 80 million PCs in the first three months of the year. The war in Ukraine Semiconductor supply disrupted This is partly because two Ukrainian companies manufacture the lasers used to produce chips.
Acer got rid of its global supply chain woes earlier this year because so much of its production takes place in the western Chinese city of Chongqing, which it missed the scope of the shutdowns in Shenzhen and Shanghai, Kao says.
The 45-year-old company based in suburban Taipei ranked fifth in global PC market share in the first quarter, according to IDC data. Lenovo came first, followed by HP, Dell and Apple. Acer has faced financial problems a decade ago due to management changes amid an increasingly competitive market. But the company has been able to make a comeback largely by designing Chromebooks and gaming PCs.
Acer launched its eco-friendly Aspire Vero line last year to get a “relatively better” position against competitors who make similar PC models, Kao says.
Vero laptops use post-consumer recycled materials in their housing and keycaps, according to Acer. Up to 85% of the packaging is recycled paper. The series started with three laptops as well as all-in-ones and accessories like keyboards. Cao says computers are easy to disassemble and repair, which means they can be fixed rather than thrown away in favor of new or new hardware. Vero models sell online for $600 or more.
“You want something unique, and then we go out,” Kao says. “We are now making most of our efforts to highlight those competitive advantages that others do not have.”
