Acer may cut back tablet, smartphone teams
updated 08:10 am EST, Fri December 23, 2011
Acer may scale back mobile teams
Acer might significantly scale back its touch device efforts if reports with possible official confirmation are accurate. The company was said by Taiwan's Economic Daily News to be dropping its touch business group and moving half of its 300 research and development workers there to other divisions. It would still have smartphone and tablet teams, but they would be cut down to 30 and 70 each.
The firm in a response acknowledged that it was looking at restructuring the company, but that it hadn't settled on any course of action. It had no intentions of dropping the smartphone and tablet groups.
The end to a dedicated touch group might be a logical extension of an existing strategy. Its Android tablets are generally under the management of the PC group, making the touch group partly superflous. Reducing the headcount at the smartphone and tablet groups would still indicate a retreat or reduced ambitions for its mobile team.
Acer is known to still be committed to tablets in at least the short term and has already teased its quad-core Iconia Tabs likely to show ahead of CES, on January 8. It has still had relatively little success with tablets, often having trouble competing with Samsung and other companies that themselves have small share relative to Apple.
The company has often been at the receiving end of the iPad's effect on PCs and competing tablets, having lost money through most of 2011.
