Acer might withdraw from tablet market by January end

Apple might have been a big headache for most of the tablet manufacturing companies. The tablet users are so very attracted to Apple Inc. that, it has really been a tough time for other tablet manufacturers. Earlier we have seen a few companies withdrawing from the tablet market, which includes big names as HP and Research in Motion.

Now, Acer the Taiwan based company, which also comes in the big names of PC suppliers has also intended to disband its touch business group in January, 2012. Although, Acer is counted among one of the world’s top five PC suppliers, by market shares.

In April 2011, headed by Acer corporate president Jim Wong, they have set up their touch business. After that they started to promote and develop tablet PC’s and also smartphones. They also regarded this business as the company’s best promising business till now.

After all these months of sales they were unable to secure an expected business unit sales and were struggling with their sluggishness of tablet PC sales. This might be the prime reason for them to choose for dissolving the unit starting in January, 2012.

More than 300 workers were engaged in the touch business out of which 150 were R&D engineers, are to be transferred to other business divisions. Another 100 will be retained; however the remainder may most likely face a layoff, according to some industry insider as reported by cens.com.

The disbandment is still to be publicized officially, although Acer directors have confirmed that the company has recently merged its Android tablet business. It originally belonged to a group dealing with touch business, into its global logistics center management and even mentioned that the once-promising division now remains only in name.

Some of the market observers believe that Acer has just sold about half of the units from what they have projected. It is believed that they were expecting a sale of about 5million units which came out to be 2.5 million to 3 million units.

It seems Apple clearly dominates the tablet market. It has really been very hard for other manufacturers to compete with the leaders. However, the recent high sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire seem to give quite a competition in the recent future. 

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