14 DAY TRIAL // The past year and a half hasn't exactly been lucrative for Acer, whose business took a big hit when netbooks, which it had heavily promoted and sold, suddenly found themselves irrelevant because of tablets.
Unusually, revenues managed to grow during June 2012, but that failed to cause the rebound Acer was hoping for.
Thus, though the company did make a profit during the third quarter (July-September), it didn't make as much as it hoped or as analysts expected.
The net income was of NT$68 million (about $2.3 million / 1.76 million Euro), very low for a world-class brand and much less than the $17.2 million / 13.19 million Euro that market watchers expected.
The flagging PC market is one reason for this outcome. Even Intel, with its immense $13.5 billion / 10.3 billion Euro revenue, lamented about it.
No one is disputing the fact that sales of personal computers have dropped, not among PC makers and not among analysts either. In fact, yearly PC shipments are bound to fall for the first time in 11 years.
Some light will be shed on Acer's exact financial numbers two days from now (Thursday, October 25, 2012), when Acer holds a financial briefing.
We have little doubt that Windows 8 will be held partially responsible for this situation. Since it was announced that it would appear on October 26, consumers have held back on buying a new PC.
Acer has another issue to deal with though: the company isn't part of the initial wave of Windows RT tablets (Windows 8 for ARM) and was quite vocal in its disapproval of Microsoft's decision to make hardware (the Surface tablet).
Thus, it won't reap as many benefits from the launch of the OS as others, implying that even the fourth quarter will leave it with underwhelming revenue. That ultrabooks shipment forecasts have been slashed by more than half doesn't really help anyone either.