Notebooks and
netbooks will
drive growth in the UK PC market, according to David Drummond,
managing director of Acer UK.
There has been a lot of interest in budget, portable PCs
following Asus' success with its
Eee netbook.
Acer says it is taking a healthy slice of the market with its
Aspire One line. Acer launched the small form factor machines in
June 2008.
Acer said it wants to grow sales in the market after
IDC's
'quarterly PC tracker' projected double digit growth for the
portable PC market in January 2008.
"Notebooks and in particular netbooks stand out as key units for
us at this time. Although IDC's figures only project a 22.8%
quarterly growth rate for the corporate market compared to 41.8% in
the home consumer space, I think that there is plenty of scope for
enterprise customers to realise the benefits of remote working with
these machines in situations where a PDA or smartphone keyboard
simply isn't big enough," said David Drummond.
After acquiring Gateway for £355m in August 2007, Acer is keen
to cement its number three position in the UK PC market. This is
behind
Hewlett-Packard's notebook line and Dell, which is
expected to launch a netbook product soon.