In BusinessWeek:

Acer also hopes to improve its position in the U.S., where it has just 1.8% of the market. The company sells lots of notebooks to small businesses, but among large corporate customers, “they don’t have the credibility” needed, says Elsa Opitz, research manager at IDC in London. Acer has raised its profile with U.S. consumers over the past two years through deals to sell its wares at Wal-Mart (WMT), CompUSA, and Circuit City (CC)—which could ultimately pay off with big companies, says U.S. sales chief Mark Hill. “More of a presence in U.S. retail,” he says, “will inevitably lead to better name recognition.”

The problem may also be that I’ve never seen an Acer that didn’t have huge quality problems - usually major hardware problems - and their customer service is usually horrible about trying to fix them. Corporate customers would be foolish to invest heavily in such unreliable machines that will save them on capital outlays but cost them orders of magnitude more on reurring service problems.

I think Acer is also overestimating the importance of the retail sector in attracting corporate customers.  Dell and pre-Lenovo IBM have/had no retail business and dominate the corporate market.  HP slowed down on retails sales when it started picking up corporate accounts.  Most importantly, though, Acer has no offerings to speak of in the server market, the real gem of the corporate accounts.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Information Asymmetries, Technology