The demand for laptops and PCs skyrocketed last year as the world turned to remote work and learning alternatives, triggering the highest growth rate for this segment in almost a decade.
Even as the industry faces ongoing shortage of semiconductors and other components, shipments of notebooks and mobile workstations have increased as the global economy recovers.
In particular, the consumer PC market was less impacted by shortages than the enterprise market, as vendors can be more flexible in the system design of consumer models, enabling workarounds for certain supply constraints.
Revenue figures for global PC shipments indicate an increase of 4.6% from the second quarter of 2020, amounting to a total of 71.6 million units in the second quarter of 2021, according to a recent Gartner report.
“We saw an incredible uptake in sales from March last year as consumers scrambled to equip themselves with products to be able to work from home and remote environments,” said Paul Collins, MEA general manager, Acer.
Collins explained that although this pandemic-fueled surge in demand has levelled off to an extent, full-time remote working is not good for either employees or businesses and a blended working model is essential for continued success in the future.
“We saw a dramatic increase in demand for laptops, all-in-one desktops, monitors and gaming devices. This has eased off somewhat in 2021, however, demand remains robust across the region. We saw a massive upsurge in online purchasing in the middle of 2020 but many customers are now returning to retail chains and I expect that a hybrid purchasing model will dominate for the foreseeable future,” he adds.
Extended remote working environments have also impacted professionals’ mental health and wellbeing, changing the way we have been programmed to work.
Collins believes that the long-term effects of this trend are still to be assessed and many studies will result from this situation.
“Much has already been written about ‘Zoom fatigue’, blurred working hours and longer time spent at work in general. From an employer perspective, creativity and innovation is lost when people cannot discuss face to face, bounce ideas off of each other or just meet over a simple coffee. This leads to a ‘task completion’ form of work rather than what makes a business a business,” he explained.
At Acer, supply chain constraints and unpredictability over the past 18 months have made it very difficult to manage the business solely using market share as a barometer.
The vendor has strategically targeted certain segments such as gaming and monitors to maintain healthy shares in these markets with contributions of over 15% in the main markets.
“Acer is fortunate in being able to touch people in many parts of their lives. We have projectors, monitors, a full gaming ecosystem and products as diverse as electric scooters and energy drinks to add to our already vast range of products. This means that Acer will be an integral part of people’s lifestyles in future as we diversify our offerings further,” added Collins.
Acer has undertaken several initiatives at a corporate, product and local level, thereby committing itself to stringent emission compliance goals, improved packaging, recycling and environmental improvement initiatives.
At the corporate level, Acer recently launched ‘Project Humanity’, an initiative to bring its employees and stakeholders closer to humanity-centric values by sharing stories and inspiring action.
“The focus of this initiative spans across education where we empower children to use technology to better their futures and environment where we work together to safeguard the planet by resource optimisation and product innovation to minimise our impact on the environment.
“5G is the next generation of mobile internet connection which offers much faster data download and upload speeds and is definitely a big opportunity for us to innovate around. In 2020, we refreshed the Acer Spin 7 with 5G connectivity making it our first ever 5G laptop,” added Collins.
Collin highlighted the company’s double digit growth in the region during the past 18 months and said: “This growth will continue well into the coming year due to the opportunities spanning across Acer’s new products, new markets such as Egypt and Qatar, and new routes to market, especially online and the Commercial Channel, which will fuel this expansion.”
