Acer (TPE: 2353) said that the company is confident of its business scale in 2016 after its successful efforts to return to the profit-making direction.
“I hope we can gain momentum and expand our business scale starting from 2016. In 2015, we expect to find the right direction for our business and then speed up the momentum in 2016,” said Stan Shih (施振榮), founder for Acer.
Shih said that Acer, the leading Taiwanese PC maker, has expanded from hardware manufacturing into several new business with a profitable outlook, which will pave the way for faster growth of the company in the long term.
“Acer is like a big ship sailing in the ocean, but we lost direction in the past few years. We spent the entire year steadying ourselves last year, and I think now we have found the right direction to a new continent,” Shih said.
Acer’s revenue for 2014 declined to an eight-year low of US$10.49 billion. The PC maker has been moving beyond hardware manufacturing into software and services as the PC industry remains stagnated.
Acer Chief Executive Jason Chen (陳俊聖) said that the company will continue to invest in cloud computing this year, in return of a hope be profitable by the end of 2015.
“Our goal is to keep Acer’s core business and new businesses profitable and growing this year,” Chen said.
After a management reshuffle in January 2014, Acer began to emerge from three consecutive years of operating losses. The company’s new strategy “Build Your Own Cloud” became the hope for the company to increase the gross revenue of its cloud application business in 2015 by acquiring more corporate customers and increasing the payout rate for individual users. Acer said that the company has seen the number of individual users of its free cloud services jump from five million last year to six million as of Jan. 21. Shih said that the figure was estimated to reach 10 million during the first six months of this year.
