The Acer Guy

It’s been a great week so far.

Monday I got to meet most of the EMEA marcoms managers. Some new faces and some I have already had the pleasure of meeting before.

So before I go any further, a big thank-you to the people from Benelux, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, UK, France, Italy, and South Africa who made the trip. It was also great to meet the ever-affable Philip again, who’s in charge of the MEA region. How that man manages such a vast territory with its many cultural, language and logistic challenges is simply beyond me.

It was fascinating to see the peculiarities of the individual countries discussed within the broader context of a single regional division. The differences in cultures, markets, public opinions and user needs are what makes this job so fascinating.

It was also great to see just how much local news escapes the bigger picture. For example, I had no idea that Acer was the official sponsor of the Women’s World Cup golfing tournament in South Africa. Nor that a spin-off of this is Acer’s involvement in the Acer Girls Golf Program - a development program for young aspiring players from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I think that beyond the obvious interest in corporate sponsorship, social causes of this nature are always worthy of note, no matter where they originate from and it is something I’d like to cover more in this blog.

Tuesday was action time. Online activities, media planning and, why not, even blog matters.

So rather than being a quiet period, it’s all systems go here at Acer. And with the help of people like those I met on Monday, it’s going to be yet another great year.

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Just a quick update on The Acer Guy website.

The domain’s registered (www.theacerguy.com), but I decided to switch to Dreamhost and this will slow down the launch as I can’t transfer the name until 60 days from registry.

The site’s coming together. I’m doing quite a lot of SEO work on it to make sure it gets a read and also quite a lot of research into the actual content. There may also be videos and perhaps even a “How to… ” page at some future date. The only thing that lets it down is the overall design so I might get it covered with some professionally-designed CSS at a later date. It’s all practice anyway.

I also trying to find an RSS reader to embed into the home page, with independent Acer news, and that’s proving tricky for someone with my level of knowledge… Any suggestions?

The move to Dreamhost also means that The Acer Guy blog will soon move over to Wordpress. I like Blogger but need the kind of functionality offered by Wordpress. As it stands, you can’t import blogs from the New Blogger directly so I’m going to have to do that manually too so I don’t lose anything.

All in all, we’re a couple of months away from launch (he says, crossing his fingers)…

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Well, it’s not just roses in EMEA. Looks like Acer is putting on quite a show in the Philippines too. Thanks Richard for the heads up

Interesting to see the way different journalists describe how Acer clawed its way up the rankings … also like the quick summary of Acer’s history.

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There is an interesting article over on BusinessWeek called Acer’s Hot New Designs. Lots of high-res pictures and quotes from senior management.

I particularly like the quote “The Taiwanese PC maker is … releasing new designs to give its budget image a tune-up”.

Talk about unsung heroes. Have these people heard about Empowering Technology, seen a list of the proprietary technology installed across the product range or even held a Ferrari 1000 in their hands and felt the exquisite solidity of the case? There is nothing budget about any of this.

My Acer notebooks have seen me through serious battles and have never failed (even when I accidentally blew one up I managed to recover the hard disk contents). Budget? The correct word is Dependable.

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Tomorrow morning (today at this point in time) I’ll be getting on a plane to spend three days in storm-battered UK.

I’m going to do what everyone connected 24/7 should every once and a while. Switch off.

That’s right, no PC for three days. It’s like going without cigarettes when you’re on 2 packs a day, or without seeing your children… the withdrawal symptoms are already showing as I’m actually writing about it.

Still, it’ll give me time to think about the future of TheAcerGuy, the site and, more urgently, the blogging platform (I want to change over to WordPress and give it a real domain).

I like WordPress as it’ll also give me the chance to add categories as there is as much theory (PR involvement in corporate blogging) as there is business practice (4Q results show Acer catching up on Lenovo). And I thought it was just going to be about notebooks…

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As I wrote a few days ago, Acer put in an amazing performance last year, conceding third place to Lenovo but making up so much ground overall, it’s getting noticed (and not just for its Ferraris!).

So much so, that in an article over on the Inquirer, HP and Dell have been advised to look in their rear-view mirrors for Acer, an 800-pound gorilla that increased sales by 37.1 percent for the whole of 2006, according to Gartner numbers for Q4.

The same article also suggests that Acer is looking to tie up with US retail giant Best Buy to sell notebooks from February which could generate a 100 percent rise in US sales.

I wonder where we’ll be this time next year?

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They say that you can tell the state of the economy by watching the performance of paper producers. The better the economic climate the greater their profits as more companies ride the economic wave by spending on advertising…

One of the more curious twists to this year’s CES was the indicator used to settle the score over the modern-day VHS Vs. Betamax battle, Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

Across the way from the CES in Las Vegas this year, the adult entertainment industry held its annual bash, and the film producers had no doubts over their chosen format.

Not your usual benchmark by any means but one that could well send shivers (more like secretive winks) throughout the entire IT business for years to come.

And, unsurprisingly, it all boils down to cost.

“Blu-ray has superior quality, yes, but HD DVD is easier to produce, cheaper to produce and there are more HD DVD players in homes than there are Blu-ray players, for example in the Xbox 360,” said one representative.

Others complained that Blu-ray discs cannot be multiplied on low cost machines and, as a result, the costs of large scale Blu-Ray disks manufacturing cancels any form of profit. Other small brands also stated: “Only bigger studios can afford Blu-ray, and even then it’s not economical.”

So, HD-DVD just got the thumbs up from one of the largest-growing digital entertainment industries. Still not convinced? According to PricewaterhouseCoopers‘, the Global Entertainment and Media industry is set to generate $1.8 TRILLION by 2010.

I know I’d settle on the easiest format, not that I’m at all interested of course.

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They say that you can tell the state of the economy by watching the performance of paper producers. The better the economic climate the greater their profits as more companies ride the economic wave by spending on advertising…

One of the more curious twists to this year’s CES was the indicator used to settle the score over the modern-day VHS Vs. Betamax battle, Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

Across the way from the CES in Las Vegas this year, the adult entertainment industry held its annual bash, and the film producers had no doubts over their chosen format.

Not your usual benchmark by any means but one that could well send shivers (more like secretive winks) throughout the entire IT business for years to come.

And, unsurprisingly, it all boils down to cost.

“Blu-ray has superior quality, yes, but HD DVD is easier to produce, cheaper to produce and there are more HD DVD players in homes than there are Blu-ray players, for example in the Xbox 360,” said one representative.

Others complained that Blu-ray discs cannot be multiplied on low cost machines and, as a result, the costs of large scale Blu-Ray disks manufacturing cancels any form of profit. Other small brands also stated: “Only bigger studios can afford Blu-ray, and even then it’s not economical.”

So, HD-DVD just got the thumbs up from one of the largest-growing digital entertainment industries. Still not convinced? According to PricewaterhouseCoopers‘, the Global Entertainment and Media industry is set to generate $1.8 TRILLION by 2010.

I know I’d settle on the easiest format, not that I’m at all interested of course.

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Well it looks like I got my answer.

According to IDC, the top five PC vendors by worldwide market share in the fourth quarter 2006 were HP (18.1 percent), Dell (14.7 percent), Lenovo Group (7.3 percent), Acer (7.1 percent), and Toshiba (3.7 percent).

Individually, again according to IDC:

HP built on its third quarter momentum, boosting year-on-year growth to nearly 24% (the fastest for HP since 2000) and taking a clear lead in worldwide shipment volume for the quarter. Growth in the United States rebounded to near 16% from a dip to single digits in the third quarter, while international growth surged above 28% with a strong showing in EMEA.

Dell was unable to recover from a slow third quarter and stumbled through the end of the year. Shipments to the U.S. market, which continue to represent over 50% of Dell volume, were down nearly 17% year on year following a single-digit decline in Q3. In addition, international growth, which was reasonably stable in the third quarter, fell to just 1.5% in 4Q06 with notably slower growth in all regions. Dell’s focus on profitability over share is coming right at a time of aggressive competition from companies such as HP, Acer, and Apple, and is compounded by a slow commercial market. As a result, Dell is in the unusual circumstance of seeing volume decline sequentially from the third quarter in both the United States and worldwide.

Lenovo continues to benefit from its leadership position in Asia/Pacific, while struggling for traction in other regions. The company continues to gain share in APeJ, which accounts for nearly 60% of volume, while shipments declined in the United States and Japan, and modest volume gains in other regions were not enough to preserve share.

Acer had another solid quarter with strong gains in all regions. EMEA represents roughly 70% of Acer’s worldwide shipments, and grew by nearly 37% in the fourth quarter, but expansion in the United States and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) also contributed to the company’s gains.

Toshiba’s focus on portable PCs continues to give the company an edge in overall growth. Worldwide shipments were up more than 17% in the fourth quarter, with an increase of more than 14% in the United States. Although growth was slower than last quarter, and closer to market rates for portable PC shipments, Toshiba continues to gain share in total shipments and benefits from the higher margins for portable PCs.

Overall, we’re going to have to concede defeat to Lenovo, but if you look closely, we’re catching up. Fast.

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I recently saw a post by Mauricio Freitas regarding the Windows Experience Index for his Ferrari 5000 (4.9).

I followed that Wikipedia link to find out more on the WEI and from there found another, very interesting site where users can upload their own scores or singular scores per component (the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) analyses all hardware components and your overall system score is determined by the lowest individual result).

This got me thinking:

Wouldn’t it be great if hardware manufacturers used this as a performance benchmark for their products? At least we’d all have a common frame of reference…

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