ACER’S CHAIRMAN JT Wang has blamed Dell and HP for its lack-luster notebook sales.
He told Digitimes that instead of slashing the prices of ordinary laptops they should be investing in ultra-thin notebooks with long battery lives.
Wang has been bending the ear of Intel to follow in the same direction, but he thinks that Dell’s and HP’s plans to push mainstream notebooks in 2010 are daft. He is worried that they will put less resources in ultra-thin notebooks.
The problem for Wang’s theory is that market demand for ultra-thin notebooks is so weak that it gets sand kicked in its face by hermit crabs.
Wang thinks this has nothing to do with people wanting to save money. Instead he thinks it is entirely due to HP and Dell dropping their mainstream notebook prices to as low as $399 in order to compete.
Since HP and Dell are not pushing ultra-thin notebooks very hard in the US, they are not becoming significant products in the market. Wang said this could mislead Intel into believing that market demand for ultra-thin notebooks is weak.
Punters really need ultra-thin notebooks Wang thinks, and he hopes that Intel will back him on this and not misjudge the market situation.
So what makes him think that ultra-thins are the way forward? He said that at the 2009 consumer trade fair in Taiwan, half of Acer’s notebook sales at the show were ultra-thin models. That was the machines, not the booth babes of course.
Acer plans to launch more competitive ultra-thin notebooks in March and April, 2010. If Wang is right Acer will clean up. However whether or not that happens will be largely dependant on the price difference between ultra-thin and mainstream notebooks.
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