Acer President Talks About Expanding Across Different Markets, AI, and RE100 Progress

Acer continues to be one of the top companies in the computer technology industry. Bolstered by its cutting-edge R&D capabilities and customer-driven innovation, they claim to have technology and computer solutions for people of all lifestyles, from business, to students, and even gamers. Now, they turn to expanding their global range of products across the world, starting with the Acer Pure air purifier.

During our visit to COMPUTEX 2024 in Taipei, we got an opportunity to interview Andrew Hou, President of Acer Pan-Asia Pacific Operations.

(Interview has been slightly edited for clarity.)

Market Differences

To start off, we asked Hou about Acer’s brand presence in various regions. Acer is quite strong in the Philippines, Indonesia, and India, but it has a much smaller market share in Japan. We expressed our curiosity about the reason for the differences in markets.

Having returned from Japan not too long ago, he responded, “I recently had a one-on-one meeting with our Japan country head and we just returned from Japan in preparation for an upcoming event. The situation is complex because we are dealing with a mature market.”

“In mature countries like Japan, PCs have been widely available for a long time, and people have established brand preferences. In contrast, Southeast Asia has a younger population that is more open to new brands. We were fortunate to enter these markets at the right time, allowing us to build brand awareness from the beginning.”

“In Japan, the market has long been dominated by Japanese brands, which makes it challenging to penetrate. Despite this, we are not giving up. We are working on specific designs tailored to different markets, and we have a major event planned in Japan, which we hope will boost Acer’s presence there.”

RE100 Progress

In 2021, Acer joined the RE100 initiative and shared a pledge to achieve 100% renewable energy use by the year 2035. 3 years later, we wonder how far along the company is Acer in terms of achieving that goal, to which Hou reassured us that “Achieving the RE100 goal by 2035 is a key corporate direction for Acer.”

“Currently, we have already reached approximately 40% of this goal. We are also working on building connections with various sources to ensure we can achieve 100% renewable electricity by 2035.”

Acer and AI

AI adoption has been a hot trend in recent years, and Acer is no exception to it, having designed their latest lineup of laptops and hardwares around integrating the technology into them. Upon our questioning of Acer’s adaptations to the AI trend, Hou replied enthusiastically, “People are very excited about AI, and we see it as a crucial standpoint. We try to be the company to break the barriers between AI technology with people.”

“To achieve this, we are collaborating with various partners, including leaders like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, who all have their own unique agendas and contributions to AI. As a device brand, it’s important for us to follow the advancements and insights of these industry leaders, and they create a way which we can then mould to design good products for the users. So, with Intel or Microsoft, we need to make sure that all the products we can make form a go-to market to step together.”

Integrate Everything! …or Don’t?

Having developed such a wide range of computer products, we found it curious that Acer has yet to implement functions to integrate multiple Acer products together, especially with the rising interest in AI of Things.

When we brought up the topic, Hou replied, “At the moment, no single technology can dominate the market. So for the AIoT, we will collaborate with all technology providers to at least connect with each other like Acer Pure, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.”

“If you’re talking about a wider AIoT, we have to make sure our devices can at least support all the technology. We want to really make sure all the devices can be connected together, but now it’s still not there yet. So we need to watch the technology trend and follow it.”

Where’s Vero?

During our time at COMPUTEX, we noticed a distinct lack of Vero products from Acer’s presentation and booth. For the uninitiated, the Vero series is Acer’s Green PC lineup, made with PCR Materials. We wondered if this spelled the end of future products for the Vero of if they had any plans to extend Vero to include products like Acer Pure in the future.

“Actually, we already have a Vero version of Acer Pure.” Hou clarified,  “The reason we didn’t emphasize it this year is that last year, ESG was a hot topic, whereas this year, the focus has shifted to AI.”

“However, Acer remains committed to the Vero product line. This commitment is part of our corporate mission and extends beyond PCs and monitors to include server workstations and Acer Pure. We will continue to release new Vero products made from recycled materials. In fact, we launched a notebook made from 100% recycled materials at Computex, but it didn’t receive much attention due to the overwhelming focus on AI topics.”

ALTOS

Based on the new NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 reference design, plenty of Acer’s competitors have already released their own server solutions. We asked Hou if Acer’s ALTOS brand would be interested in becoming a partner of it, to which he denied.

“Currently, ALTOS is more like a x86 server brand. If you talk about GB200, I think we are not that high and high end yet. It is more like a big data center, so we haven’t started yet because those are already occupied by Taiwanese manufacturers. However, ALTOS has a massive portfolio including workstations, new IT systems for the government, and even mega-scale data centers.”

Predator League Lineup

Recent game releases from Japanese developers are increasingly coming to the PC platform. In light of this, we pondered if the Asia Pacific Predator League would consider adding these new and upcoming games to its competition lineup.

“When hosting the Predator League, we typically conduct surveys to determine the most popular games and titles preferred by gamers in each country. We usually select the top two games for our competition.”

“While Japanese console games are increasingly being ported to PC, they often differ from the PC shooting games that are popular in the Predator League, such as PUBG, which emphasizes teamwork and special shooting mechanics.”

“However, if these Japanese titles become popular on the PC platform and gain a significant following among gamers, we would definitely consider including them in the Predator League lineup. For now, we are closely monitoring their popularity.”

Final Words

As we wrapped up the interview, we asked Hou if he had any final remarks to make to our readers about the Acer Pure.

“This is the lifestyle brand that Asia would like to work on. In the past, I think Japanese home appliances were sold everywhere. Thinking about the Taiwanese, we have so many IT companies and a bicycle industry. But talking about home appliances, we don’t have a big company that can really stand out or go out of Taiwan to sell in other countries. But this is also our ambition. We want you to use Acer Pure outside of Taiwan.”

“That is already happening. For instance, our Acer Pure air purifiers are sold online on Rakuten, where we have achieved the No. 1 position. This marks the first time a Taiwanese home appliance brand has reached the top in Japan, which is notable given Japan’s strong home appliance market.”

“So, other than Acer Pure, we also will try to be more aggressive in other countries. For Indonesia and Malaysia, we also have some local plans ready.”

“Actually, I was just in Malaysia last week. We will be more aggressive to launch Acer Pure in Malaysia as well. Indonesia will come later because Indonesia has a lot of government regulations surrounding home appliances. So, we will need to first apply a lot of their regulations. We are trying to make our Asia brand no longer only an IT or PC brand. We want to make sure Acer is more lifestyle focused, which more users can touch and feel every day.

This concludes our interview with Andrew Hou. We would like to once again thank him and the Acer Asia Pacific Team for their time with us.

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