Acer Sees No Slowdown in Sales

A few days ago in Compal and Quanta Expect Decreasing Demand we noted that executives from Compal and Quanta were becoming pessimistic about future notebook sales. At the time we noted demand for PCs remains strong but that the executives were expecting the declining global economy to have a negative impact on sales. Reuters now reports Acer has seen a 33% increase in sales in Q2 and sees no slowdown in demand. According to Reuters:

Acer Inc, the world's third-biggest PC vendor, said it had no major concerns about effects on its business of an economic slowdown after posting a 33 percent increase in sales in the second quarter.

Sales rose to 124.8 billion Taiwan dollars ($4.1 billion), Acer said on Thursday, while net profit grew 48 percent to 2.92 billion Taiwan dollars, below the average forecast of 3.13 billion Taiwan dollars in a Reuters poll.

Acer is expanding aggressively into emerging markets and through acquisitions in developed markets and had 9.4 percent of the market in the second quarter, behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell, according to research firm Gartner.

Chief Executive Gianfranco Lanci said Acer expected to continue to gain market share in the third and fourth quarters and to grow at about 5 to 10 percentage points above market rates.

Separately, Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said the company expected third-quarter net profit to be higher than the previous three months as the U.S. housing downturn and global inflationary woes had little impact on its business.

"We weren't really affected by the subprime crisis and global inflation problems," Wang told reporters on the sidelines of a business event in Taipei.

"We expect profit to be higher also due to new products being launched after we acquired Gateway."

As the article notes, Acer are focusing on selling into emerging markets hence making them less vulnerable to economic swings in the developed economies. A few years ago a downturn in the US economy would definitely have seen an equivalent downturn in PC demand the US market was dominant but I think more and more companies are diversifying their geographical target markets and are therefore able to hedge against a downturn in any single economy.

Reuters: Acer Q2 sales up 33 pct, no concerns about slowdown