Acer: We'll pass Dell 'very soon'

Acer President Gianfranco Lanci is feeling confident these days. At a news conference in London Wednesday, he declared that his company is on the verge of overtaking Dell as the second-largest PC maker in the world.

Gianfranco Lanci

(Credit: Acer)

"We don't expect revenue to decline this year, which is outstanding, compared to our competitors. Therefore, we're (expecting) good growth in 2010 again," Lanci said. "Between this quarter and the next, we can finally pass Dell."

Dell currently sits behind Hewlett-Packard, which has been the world leader in PCs with approximately 20 percent of all units sold worldwide, according to market research firm IDC. Dell has about 14 percent of all PCs shipped, and Acer 13 percent.

Dell's and Acer's momentum have been heading in opposite directions for some time now. Shortly after Dell was unseated as the worldwide leader in PCs by HP in late 2006, Acer began to stake its claim. The Taiwanese company began aggressively entering the U.S. and European markets by selling inexpensive notebooks, and in late 2007, bought U.S. PC maker Gateway, followed by Packard-Bell. Since then Dell has continued to struggle, and has been sidetracked by the task of reinventing itself and its company strategy when it comes to consumer PCs.

Acer has pushed cheaper Netbooks and notebooks, and quite quickly outgrown the rest of the competition. But it also has bigger prey than Dell on its mind.

Lanci added that, "I would expect not only to pass Dell very soon, but also to breach the gap with HP in terms of" notebooks, Netbooks, and smartphones.

We'll find out exactly how worried Dell and HP should be soon. IDC and Gartner, both firms that track the PC industry, are expected to release their latest market share totals for the third quarter Wednesday afternoon.

[Vegaman_Dan]

This may happen in the consumer market, but I don't see it happening in the enterprise level where Acer simply doesn't have the same capability of providing next day or on site service like HP and Dell can now.

Example: Hard drive failure in a two year old laptop:

Dell: Same or Next Day service, warranty covered.
Acer: 7-10 business days, you need to send the unit in for service, and it typically carries a one year warranty only, so you'll have to pay for a replacement drive.

Which one is the company who is interested in the minimum of downtime going to look at more seriously?

[vini156]

You are right. My friend's dell laptop had a strange problem related to keyboard. They sent a guy directly to his home and he fixed it within an hour. They have improved their service and local presence, there is no question about it.

[Random_Walk]

"This may happen in the consumer market, but I don't see it happening in the enterprise level where Acer simply doesn't have the same capability of providing next day or on site service like HP and Dell can now."

Agreed, though if Dell loses its lunch money on the consumer side, then prices could go up on the enterprise side to compensate; this makes them less competitive against HP.

[gsmiller88]

Cheap is as cheap does. My employer uses either Acer or Lenovo PCs (not sure as there is no logo on the PC itself) and the IT guy is continuously having to service one or two of them.

[HlLLARY CLITON]

Dell is sliding downward for a reason, you people can give a couple personal examples where Dell has treated you right but there are plenty of unhappy customers as well. Dell products are overpriced in my opinion and the few times I've had to talk to customer service I could hardly understand them, from India I think

[WinNoMo]

The first thing I do when I call for support on any product when I discover the person on the other end of the line is not in the USA; I stop doing business with that company permanently. We as Americans are so obsessed with buying the cheapest things that we are bargain shopping ourselves right out of our jobs. We need to put the pride back into Made in the USA.

[Mr_7235]

That may be, but having dealt with Lenovo's Georgia based Thinkpad support, I can tell you that the only difference between an American and an Indian support rep is a few thousand miles of ocean.

[Renegade Knight]

Dell was absolutly the worst company I've ever dealt with on a warranty claim. My laptop is dead, the problem is not caused by an "external cause" making it covered by the warranty and Dell refuses to repair it. Heck I even told them I'd pay for the repair if they verified it was caused by an external factor and they sent it back saying I refused the repair and blamed the problem on the external cause as a matter of policy. A local shop that I paid to examine the laptop proved my case. However policy trumps fact in Dell land. Needless to say I don't buy Dell. That's cost them several computers already. Others (Including Apple) picked up the slack.

[02cfranklin]

Can't stand Dell. Always had problems with them. Only time I've had a problem with an Acer is when my little sis spilled orange juice on the keyboard :P

[wlxfeedpartner2]

Dell has strong customer support base compared to ACER.

[CoolMal]

I have been using Dell for past few years and had mixed experience from the CS. however, off late I've become extremely unhappy with the machines they make. All kinds of problems right after the warranty expires. I have decided not to purchase Dell ever again.

[tektaktyks]

acer cs is crap,dont buy it,i thought they are ok but no way,my father have aspire 9300 ,i tried upgrading ram to 4 gigs,could not do it,called acer tech support(in india i guess from the accent) and they would not help me at all,called all available numbers from their website,no help.after browsing dozens of forums i found that the latest bios will not take 4 gigs,have to reset to original...how dumb is that?Will NEVER buy acer! [CNET editors' note: Prohibited content deleted.]

[subslug]

Acer's probably doing well because in poorer countries this is all they can afford. How well does Dell sell overseas? Isn't there an insane tax on anything from the US? It's called fair trade, as long as it's fair for everyone except US companies.

[WintyB]

Acer will do fine in the regular consumer market. Bought my gf a Acer laptop (figured I should try them out on her instead of myself! ) and I'm really surprised by the performance. It's a cheaper body, but it runs better than my HP laptop. However, with Vista there were some support issues with the built in camera and other keys (volumn up/down doesn't work on Vista) Hopefully they have fixed those issues with Vista and soon to be released Win7.

Dell will be fine in enterprise as mentioned earlier. No one can touch them in terms of support, I just believe they've hit a wall in terms of getting people to order a custom built Dell that will take 2 weeks to get to me, when I can go to Best Buy and get a comparable machine for less money tonight. We use Dell here (work in education) and these small work stations haul with XP and our I.T. guys have hardly any issues besides the random hard drive failure. We'll see what happens when we switch to Win 7 in about a year.

[dragonsky1]

Dell's "affordable" PC's are garbage, pure and simple. Their defect and return rate to retailers is much higher than Toshiba, HP, Sony or Apple. And the customers I've sold them to have very little good to say about their tech support.

Not to mention, I have been told about more than one instance of Dell refusing to honor a customer's warranty, even just a few weeks after their purchase.

Now their more expensive lines, XPS, Adamo, etc, aren't too bad, but they are considerably more expensive than the competition. In fact, comparable XPS models use come in higher than similar Apple and Sony models. Both of which have much better customer service.

There really is no reason to buy a Dell whatsoever, when you can get better product cheaper from someone else, and get better customer support.

[Renegade Knight]

The problem with "affordable PC's" being garbage is that the garbage creeps in to the formerly quality models.

[query0563]

Perception lags reality - all notebooks are made by the same small pool of contractors - the lion's share by just two of them. Doesn't matter if it says Acer - or HP - or Dell. It was made by Compal, Quanta or one of the smaller ODMs (Pegatron, Wistron, Foxconn, Inventec, etc.).

There's just no difference in the hardware.

[mesonto]

Dell is great! At least in my experience not one of my machines has ever had problems and all of them (even the ones I never use anymore for work purposes) are still going strong. As far as customer service goes, I really don't care who helps me as long as they get the job done well and Dell has done me proud. I actually did have to return a sound bar to one of their monitors (kick @ss btw) because it was defective. Anyway, I guess as soon as someone gets one bad experience they end up telling everyone else not to buy from the company that let them down. So in this case I will have to say Dell rocks, they have never let me down and my equipment is still running very well.

[WinNoMo]

Michael? Is that you?

[gggg sssss]

Sending money to the Koreas is criminal, but not as bad as sending money to the Chinese govt to buy a Lenovo. It will serve us right ( shadenfreude) when there are no tech jobs left in the US because we are too stupid and short sighted to buy american to the limited extend we still can.