Acer makes Ideal choice but denies channel cull

Acer has enlisted Ideal Hardware to spearhead its campaign to increase UK notebook market share in a move tipped to precede a cull of its distribution channel.

Acer has enlisted Ideal Hardware to spearhead its campaign to increase UK notebook market share in a move tipped to precede a cull of its distribution channel.

Acer announced this week that Ideal will stock Acer's entire range and will be central to its goal of achieving "significant growth" in the portable computing arena. Acer claims a four per cent share of the notebook market.

Acer has eight distributors in the UK: Datrontech, Emcee Distribution, Enta Technologies, Midwich, Phoenix Distribution Services, Northamber, SI Distribution and Sphinx CST.

Scott Dodds, sales director at Acer, confirmed that a review of Acer's supply channel was underway, but denied that it will be cutting its distributors.

However, he confirmed that a distribution agreement with Mobile Planet has recently been terminated.

Dodds also denied that Ideal's appointment was unlikely to see a cannibalisation of the market as the distributor is expected to add new business in line with Acer's shift from niche markets to the corporate mid-sized and enterprise sectors.

Barry Dodhia, marketing manager at reseller Hemini, said PC and notebook sales should be left to distributors accustomed to selling to the sector, but that a cull of Acer's distributors was good news as "a lot of the smaller distributors do not stock up sufficiently".

Ideal also announced it was going to be the sole distributor for optical media vendor Traxdata, and would sell 133 million CD-R/CD-RW/DVD and MiniDisc media products in the next three years.

- After some unfounded speculation that companies such as Ingram Micro, Northamber and Westcoast are being linked to Ideal, chief executive Ian French told CRN that he was "happy with the way Ideal is going" and that the group was still "committed to its demerger".