Acer

Acer Inc is a Taiwanese hardware and specialty electronics manufacturer based in Xizhi, New Taipei. It was founded in 1976 by Stan Shih, his wife Carolyn Yeh and five others in the city of Hsinchu. They began as distributors of electronic parts and as consultants in the use of microprocessor technologies. In the beginning they manufactured two Apple II clones before joining the IBM PC compatible market, and thus became a reference PC manufacturer.

In 1998, they were reorganized into five groups:

• Acer International Service Group
• Acer Sertek Service Group
• Acer Semiconductor Group
• Acer Information Products Group
• Acer Peripherals Group

Due to customer complaints that Acer was competing with their own products, and to alleviate the competitive nature of their brand sales against contract manufacturing businesses, they spun off the contract business in 2000, and renamed it Wistron. Corporation.

In 2001, they sold their BenQ and Wistron manufacturing units to focus resources on product designer, marketer and distributor duties. The production processes would be carried out from then on through contracted manufacturers. They also have a part of their business in the integration of cloud services and platforms, smartphones and wearables with value-added IoT applications. By January 2005, Gianfranco Lanci became president.

In the mid-2000s, consumer laptops were almost the only growth drivers of the PC industry, and low overheads benefited them during this period. They grew rapidly in Europe when they adopted the use of traditional distribution channels aimed at retail consumers, instead of going to online sales markets and business customers. In 2007, they bought Gateway in the United States and Packard Bell in Europe, becoming the third largest supplier of computers and the second largest supplier of laptops.