Taiwanese computer giant Acer vowed to restore its glory in the personal computer market in the Chinese mainland with the release of its latest high-end products.

"We must consolidate our image as a quality computer maker and expand to other products, otherwise the only tool we can use in the competition will be price, but that will be disastrous to the market as well as to us," said Scott Lin, president of regional operations for the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong.

The PC maker recently released its Aspire 3 series of computers in Beijing. These integrate the functions of computers as well as home appliances.

The desktops - RC900 and RC500, are priced at about 14,000 yuan (US$1,690) and 11,000 yuan (US$1,329) respectively, twice as much as the prices of ordinary computers in the Chinese mainland market and even more than the price of a notebook computer.

Eight years ago, the company released its Aspire 1 worldwide and won immediate success with its cool design and rich functions.

The company recorded 320,000 units of shipment in the United States and became one of the top 10 computer makers in the world.

Acer released the second generation of Aspire series last year and sold 267,000 units worldwide, including about 40,000 units on the Chinese mainland.

"The market has responded to our products very favourably and the previous goal of selling 400,000 units even looks a little conservative now," said Lin.

The shipments of Aspire 3 will amount to as many as 70,000 units on the Chinese mainland.

Acer has received orders for 100,000 units in July worldwide, according to Lin.

Besides the rich functions of Aspire 3, Acer is also expanding its sales network on the Chinese mainland to promote the sales.

Scott Lin said his company has set up 16 offices on the Chinese mainland. The number will reach 20 by year end.

The Taiwan-based computer firm has also opened 170 retail outlets.

However, a bigger ambition behind the release of the Aspire series is to strengthen Acer's brand image as a high-end product maker and to seek more progress in business-use desktop and notebook markets.

"We can establish an image as a high-end product maker and extend it to business-use computer and notebook markets, so we can avoid using price as the only competitive edge," said Scott Lin.

He said Acer would become the fifth or fourth biggest global vendor of notebooks by the end of this year from the sixth position in 2002.

The computer giant, which aims to further expand its share in the laptop computer market, will aggressively adopt Intel's Centrino processors released in March. The Centrino has an embedded wireless local area network (WLAN) function.

More than 70 per cent of Acer notebooks will be equipped with Centrino processors in this quarter, compared with the 30 per cent ratio in the second quarter.

(HK Edition 07/08/2003 page7)