Acer, who is about to launch their Iconia tablet offerings in Australia, has already started to feel the effect of tablet purchases on their global notebook sales with the company claiming over the weekend that its PC sales in the first quarter would fall short of expectations.In a sobering note to analysts Acer said that its PC revenues were 10 per cent less than in the fourth quarter of last year, during which Acer suffered an 11 per cent year-on-year fall in revenues.
Last week research gtroup IDC forecast that the Australian media tablet market will grow by 85% in 2011 stimulated by the launch of Apple’s second generation device, the iPad 2, along with a raft of others from PC manufacturers like Acer.
The research company also said that the Australian PC market grew 20% in 2010 year on year (YoY) to reach 5.7 million units, although the Q4 market performance was weaker than expected. Overall Q4 2010 PC shipments increased 4% sequentially and 14% YoY, according to IDC’s Australia quarterly PC tracker.
In Australia, Acer, who has struggled in the Smartphone market, due to distribution issues, despite their notebook sales being strong, is days away from launching an Android and Windows based tablet offering.
However all PC manufacturers are struggling to get their tablet offerings into distribution channels especially among carriers like Telstra, Optus and Vodafone who appear to be concentrating on tablet offerings from the likes of Motorola, HTC and Samsung, brands which also have a strong mobile phone offering.
Toshiba, who first talked about their 10″ Folio Tablet six months ago has still not confirmed a launch date in Australia.
“We’ve been hearing about Acer’s weakness in market for some time, but this is confirmation of how weak it is,” Jenny Lai, head of Taiwan research at HSBC said upon hearing the Acer announcement.
“It also shows that the tablets’ cannibalisation of the notebook and netbook markets is definitely happening.”
Amid concern over the impact of the Japan earthquake on supply chains, Acer’s statement is a reminder that any weakness in global demand represents a far greater danger for most technology groups Lai said.
Acer’s decline over the past few months has left it struggling to maintain its number two spot against Dell.
That shift partly reflects a cyclical change in the PC industry.
While the immediate recovery from the financial crisis was driven by consumers buying slimmer notebooks and netbooks with a longer battery life, over the past year it has been corporate IT spending that has driven the PC market.
Consumer demand, which weakened as economic uncertainty in the US and Europe persisted, has turned to tablets and smartphones.
Gartner, the research consultancy, this month lowered its PC shipment forecast for 2011 by 5 per cent to 387.8m.
Acer said that it expected second-quarter shipments to be flat compared with the first quarter, partly because “Acer started shipping tablet PCs in March, and will launch several new models in Q2 to ramp up the unit shipment”.
Acer is probably not alone in having a disappointing first quarter.
February revenue numbers from the top contract PC manufacturers in Taiwan, which account for 90 per cent of production, were down roughly a fifth from January.
