PC sales will defy downturn, says Acer

PC sales will continue to show double-digit growth over the next three years despite the financial crisis, Acer chief executive Gianfranco Lanci said today.

Uncertainty might cause corporate sales to slow down slightly but consumer sales would continue to rise because computers had become in necessity in people lives, he told a press conference in Budapest.

Lanci also said he believed Europe, which accounts for 48 percent of Acer sales, would not be as hard hit by the crisis as the US.

He predicted that notebook sales would outstrip those of PCs by next year but that the desktop is with us to stay, but in smaller and quieter forms. He reckoned sales of mobiles would grow by 25 to 30 percent in the next three years.

Average selling prices would continue to fall but not as fast as in the past two years and consolidation will speed up, Franci said.“A lot of small local payers won’t be able to survive.”

The market was changing in other ways. PCs were becoming a commodity, evolution was slowing down, and technology was becoming less important because there was less differentiation between products.

As a result branding was becoming more important. Acer had bought Packard Bell, Gateway and E-Machines and each of these brands would be used to address different markets. Packard Bell models would address for the “style and trendy” market in Europe, and Gateway going for the same market in Asia and the US.

The Acer brand would address the more technical user and E-Machines will go for the value market.

Acer has bought Taiwanese smart-phone vendor E-Ten to address the emerging mobile-internet-device (MID) market.