Acer’s chief executive Gianfranco Lanci resigned after arguments with Acer’s board about what the company would be doing in the future. Acer, which is the third largest computer maker, recently put out information that suggested that their PC revenue outlook is not very good.
The company announced on Thursday that Lanci’s resignation was immediately effective. The acting CEO of Acer is set to be board chairman J.T. Wang until they find a more permanent solution.
A week prior to the company reported that their first quarter PC revenue was 10 percent less than the previous quarter and would not meet expectations. It’s thought the cause is because sales in Europe and the U.S. have been weak. Predictions said that the next quarter will see no increase in PC shipments.
Unfortunately for stock holders, the announcement caused the loss of more than $1 billion in market value in only four days, the Reuters news agency reported.
Acer said that the disagreement that Lanci and other board members held was on the company’s future treatment of the importance of company growth, customer value creation, brand position enhancement, and on resource allocation and methods of implementation.
The company plans to keep PCs as their core product and plans to expand its commercial computer business, as well as getting into the new mobile device market.
Acer also plans to begin selling storage and servers in the U.S. for the first time. The products would include a total of 16 tower, rack, blade, and rack multi-node servers. The systems are going to be based on Intel Xeon or Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron processors. Acer plans to resell Hitachi storage products.
Acer has been rated as the world’s third-largest computer maker, when it comes to shipments of products, right after HP and Dell.
