Acer blames its decline on Ultrabook, touch panel investments

Newly minted Acer CEO Jason Chen held a press conference today in Taiwan, his first since taking the helm of the sluggish PC manufacturer last month. To kick off his tenure as Acer’s head cheese, Chen offered some thoughts on why he felt the company has ceded significant chunks of marketshare to rival computer manufacturers, stating that the firm made a costly error by diving into investments of touch panels and Ultrabooks too hard and too fast.

“We wanted to stimulate demand using new technology and we took the initiative more aggressively than anybody else, to the point where we got hurt,” Chen said. “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistake we made before.” Chen also stated that “We need to dig ourselves out of a hole,” according to Bloomberg.

And what a hole it’s been. Despite the fact that Acer has released solid products, like its unconventional but excellent R7 notebook, market research firm IDC found that, during the fourth quarter of 2013, Acer suffered from a 21.4 percent decline in sales of their PCs when compared to the previous period in 2012. This was also the largest drop experienced by any of the big PC manufacturers, which include Lenovo and HP.

Though Acer has made some progress in the tablet market, with its slate marketshare having grown from under 1 percent in the third quarter of 2012 to 2.5 percent in the same period during 2013, Chen and the firm will both need to do something swiftly in order to halt the free fall that the company has experienced in recent times.