14 DAY TRIAL // When you hire someone to work for you, the contract usually includes some non-disclosure clause in regards to your trade secrets, but sometimes people share them anyway, even before they stop working for you. This can cause trouble to both sides, as Acer is learning right now.
Truth be told, it's actually a pretty frequent occurrence for a worker or two, or a group, to leak technological and business expertise to rival companies.
Sometimes it happens after a worker or higher staff member moves from one company to another. Other times it happens while the person is still with the originator of the trade secret.
Acer is dealing with the fallout of a situation belonging to the latter category. Well, technically nothing has been proven yet, but there are suspicions that two of the company's workers have been trading secrets.
That is why the company's headquarters was searched by prosecutors on March 18, just a few days prior to this article's writing.
It was an isolated case involving only some individuals, the company made sure to say. Alas, such events never go by without a corporation's image being at least temporarily tarnished.
The two workers are said to have found Acer's financial results and selling their stock holdings in the company before the results were released back in November 2013.
So it wasn't, ultimately, a case of technological acumen or engineering secrets being slipped to rivals, just an example of every man for himself.
Acer probably won't suffer from the case at all, beyond this small ripple at the media level. Which is good for it, because the IT player hasn't exactly been in the best of states over the past couple of years.
Ever since tablets showed up all of a sudden back in 2010 and brought a swift and brutal end to the netbook market, Acer has been struggling to stay afloat on the PC front and the IT market as a whole.
The PC maker depended greatly on the then-huge market for low-end, low-cost laptops, but their unexpected and rapid decline (they basically dropped into unimportance in a matter of months) hit Acer hard.
Three years and many management changes later, Acer seems almost rebalanced, but issues still crop up from time to time, like low stock prices that cause people to sell their share in the company because they expect the stock value to only drop.