Acer models enter the fray

Thailand becomes the company's sixth Asian market for the phones, following recent launches in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The move follows Acer's acquisition of Taiwanese smart-phone manufacturer E-Ten last year, a purchase that enabled Acer to shortcut its tapping of the global market.

Aymar de Lencquesaing, Acer senior corporate vice president, said it was the right time for Acer to jump into the smart-phone market, as the global mobile-phone market is about 4 billion units, of which only 300 million are smart phones.

Meanwhile, the trend in mobile-data use has been increasing rapidly, which is expected to drive the global smart-phone market to grow by 15 per cent annually over the next five years. This means there are great opportunities out there, said de Lencquesaing.

He admitted the company's move into smart phones was a big one, as it is a totally different business and market from that which Acer has traditionally been involved in.

However, with the strong Acer corporate brand and dedicated teams overseeing the hand-held business and 500 global research and development engineer resources, he believes Acer has the capability to take its place among the top five smart-phone players in the world within three to five years.

"Our ambition is to become a leader in the mobile-data market. The launch of smart phones is to complete our product lines and encourage us to meet our goals. Acer has already reached No 2 in the worldwide notebook market and is No 1 in the global netbook market," said de Lencquesaing.

He said Thailand was a highly attractive market for Acer's hand-held business. The company also targets being among the top five in this market within three to five years.

"In the initial stage, the dedicated team - the Smart Hand-held Business Group of Acer Computer (Singapore) - will take care of smart-phone business in Thailand, but we will certainly have a local dedicated team to oversee this new business unit soon," said de Lencquesaing.

The company plans to bring more than 10 smart-phone models to Thailand this year, of which five were launched yesterday: the Acer DX900, DX650, X960, M900 and F900.

"We plan to launch more products continuously to the Thai market. We believe the global smart-phone market can grow by more than 15 per cent per year if there are more good-performing and reasonably priced phones available," he said.

Roger Yuen, Asia-Pacific vice president of Acer Computer's Smart Hand-held Business Group, said the key to successful distribution of Acer smart phones to a wide Thai market was having good local partners.

Acer has therefore appointed major IT retailer IT City and leading IT wholesaler SIS Distribution's Qdist to be its distribution partners for the devices.

"With the market capability and readiness of Thailand, we think we can reach the goal of becoming one of the top five smart-phone players earlier than our projection of within the next three to five years," said Yuen.

IT City president Ekachai Sirijirapatana said by next month, Acer smart phones would be available in about 10 IT City outlets, with all 34 outlets stocking the devices by year-end.