Acer stopped making its own computers and grew bigger for it
Around the turn of the millennium, Taiwan's Acer did something counterintuitive for a hardware company: it spun off and sold its own factories. Customers had grumbled that it competed with the very brands it built machines for, so Acer chose to design, market and sell, and let contract manufacturers handle production.
The company started in 1976 in Hsinchu as Multitech, founded by Stan Shih, his wife Carolyn Yeh and five partners with eleven employees and 25,000 dollars. At first it distributed electronic parts and advised clients on microprocessors. It then built the Micro-Professor training kit and a pair of Apple II clones before moving into IBM-compatible PCs, and took the name Acer in 1987. Acquisitions followed, including Commodore's PC division in 1993 and Texas Instruments' notebook business in 1997.
The awkward part was that Acer sold its own branded computers while also assembling machines for other brands, some of them rivals. In 2000 it spun the contract work off as Wistron, and in 2001 sold both Wistron and BenQ to concentrate on design and sales. The leaner model paid off. Revenue climbed from 4.9 billion dollars in 2003 to 11.31 billion in 2006, helped by cheap overheads, loyalty to retail channels in Europe while competitors chased online and business buyers, and a boom in consumer notebooks.
In 2007 Acer bought Gateway in the United States, for 710 million dollars, and a controlling stake in Europe's Packard Bell, becoming the third-largest computer maker and second in notebooks. Its dream of becoming number one, however, tied it tightly to cheap, high-volume PCs, and when buying habits shifted it suffered. Poor results in November 2013 led the chairman J.T. Wang and president Jim Wong to resign, and co-founder Stan Shih stepped back in until Jason Chen arrived from TSMC.
Acer has since spread into odder corners, from Predator gaming gear to smart prayer beads that count mantras, and in 2021 pledged to run on fully renewable energy by 2035. As of 2024 it ranked sixth among the world's PC vendors by units sold.
Source: Acer Inc.
