Acer to increase tablet orders at the cost of that of its netbooks

Tablets have long been eating into netbooks’ market share – and no one is feeling it more than Acer, a company that has probably sold more netbooks than anyone else. The Taiwanese company has recently told its upstream partners that it would shift its focus from the netbooks to Tablet PCs, reason being the latest rise in demand of these portable touch devices. As a result, Acer plans to reduce orders of Aspire One series of netbooks and replace it with the Iconica Tablet PCs starting this April.

Digitimes reports that Acer has a rather ambitious aim of shipping about 4-5m units of 10.1” tablet devices for the month.

The problem with starting so late is that almost all the manufacturing facilities, touchscreen capacities in this case, are booked mainly for the Apple iPad 2, although Taiwan-based TPL Holding was eventually ready to provide Acer with capacity for making the first-tier touchscreens.

Acer profits fell 64% following a disastrous quarter that yielded a profit of only $41. It is one of the most disastrous results in the history of the company’s sales, the reason for which was cited as the steep decline in sales of the Acer notebook and netbooks over the last and current year.

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