Servers, smartphones to drive Acer India growth

Acer, the world’s second largest personal computer (PC) maker, expects its India revenues to grow 25 per cent to touch Rs 2,500 crore during calendar 2010.

Last year, Acer India’s revenues grew a little over 14 per cent owing to the muted demand in the wake of the global economic slowdown. Though, industry analysts peg the growth of the PC industry in the lower double digits this year, Acer India expects its growth to be twice that of the industry average.

“We saw growth coming from the retail segment last year. This year, we expect growth to be driven by the commercial, SMB and education sectors,” says W S Mukund, managing director of Acer India. At present, Acer India derives close to 20 per cent of its revenues from monitors and about 40 each from desktops and notebooks.

A part of the growth will come from servers and smartphones — the two segments into which the company has just started diversifying. Though, Acer is not new to the server market in India, the company has started enhancing its server product portfolio with the launching of tower, rack and blade servers for high power computing and data centre environment.

Acer’s share in the server market in India has grown five-fold during the last one quarter. “We had servers earlier, but not in the same range that we have today. Today, we have the entire portfolio of servers to address the data centres with increased capacity and energy efficiency. While our server business was primarily targeted at banking, insurance and education sectors earlier, we are poised to compete with the top three vendors in addressing the SMB, government, oil & gas, power and telecom sectors,” says S Rajendran, chief marketing officer of Acer India. He adds that with the launch of the new server ranges, the company aims to double its marketshare in this category to about 14 per cent by the end of 2010.

Meanwhile, Acer — which forayed into the smartphone markets recently — is planning to increase the reach of its marketing campaign. Ever since the products were launched (couple of weeks ago), the company sold about 3,000 units, says Mukund. At present, Acer has two smartphone models selling in India — one priced about Rs 10,000 and the other Rs 24,999. Mukund says, the company plans to introduce one more model in the mid-segment in the near future.

He, however, adds that the Indian market is unique for new smartphone launches since it typically takes at least three months to test new product before its launch. The smartphone market size in India is estimated at 3.9 to 4.2 million units, with a YoY growth of about 40 per cent.