Acer CEO hails B2B growth
Jason Chen says B2B has risen from 20 to 35 per cent of revenues under his watch, but says it would be 'even better if it was 50-50'
Acer's CEO said he hopes the vendor will one day generate 50 per cent of revenues from the commercial market as he tackled questions about whether it can ever be regarded as a serious B2B channel player.
Jason Chen told CRN that the commercial market has grown from 20 to 35 per cent of Acer's business since he took the helm in December 2013.
"It would be even better if it was 50-50," he said.
Most UK corporate resellers are lined up behind either HP, Dell or Lenovo in the PC space, with consumer-leaning Acer sometimes viewed as a less obvious choice.
"We never want to go into loss again."
But Chen argued that Acer possesses the B2B chops to challenge the big three.
"We do want to change that [perception]. I remember when I came on board and did our first press conference in Taipei, the first question I got was 'what is your commercial strategy'? I had been at the company seven days and I thought, 'what do you mean by commercial strategy?'. Later on, I realised that 80 per cent of our business is consumer and 20 per cent is commercial, and over time our commercial business has grown up and is now more than 35 per cent of our total business. In certain countries like China and the US it is bigger than our consumer business.
"There's a couple of things needed to do [commercial] right. Number one is the product, as the commercial product requirements are different from consumer. The life cycle management and security requirements are also different and so we have to make sure we have the right channel strategy. And third is the service capability."
Chen's comments come after Acer launched what it claims is the world's first notebook measuring under 1cm thick, in the form of the Swift7 (pictured).
"In the Acer product group, we are constantly talking about what can be done and can we do it less than one centimetre," Chen said. "You could argue how big a deal 0.05 centimetres' difference is. But our engineers want to challenge themselves to do it better than others, and I say 'good, go do it'."
Having sat behind only HP in the global PC standings as recently as 2010, Acer is now in sixth place, according to Gartner's Q2 data, with a 6.9 per cent slice of the pie.
Chen admitted there was "a lot of anxiety" at Acer when he joined two and a half years ago as the fourth CEO in two months, and - when asked if the 6.9 per cent figure is where he wants to be - said the Taiwanese vendor had ditched its obsession with market share under his watch.
"Before I came in, market share was a big deal, but that changed after I arrived. Our number one thing is profitability. We wanted to regain confidence from our customer and supply chain and make the company sustainable. That's not to say market share is not important, but we want to maximise our market share in a profitable way. We never want to go into loss again."