Acer to stop “pursuing market share blindly with cheap and unprofitable” crap  

Lorraine Luk at Dow Jones:

For the third quarter ended Sept. 30, Acer posted a net loss of NT$1.1 billion as it adjusted European inventories in the face of weak demand. Acer shares are down 62% so far this year, compared with the benchmark index’s 22% decline. “The legacy of previous management reshuffle and operational restructuring is almost over. We will shift our strategy to improving profitability from pursuing market share blindly with cheap and unprofitable products,” Wang said.

Acer’s brand has been so tarnished by their “cheap and unprofitable products” that I don’t know how easy it will be to recover, even with a new executive team and a new internal philosophy. The company took Intel’s financial incentive bait to build “ultrabooks”– which are really just MacBook Airs that run Windows–and that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the company’s ability to think independently. Plus, their first Ultrabook, the Aspire S3, was a piece of junk.

Acer has some potential key advantages as a hardware design company, including extremely close relationships with fellow Chinese manufacturers that could give them a leg up on American companies like Dell and HP. However, they don’t appear to be doing anything innovative at all.

At any rate, it’s good to hear straight from the CEO’s mouth that Acer will stop making “cheap and unprofitable” crap.

(Discovered via AllThingsD; full story at The Wall Street Journal)