ACER, the world’s third-largest PC player globally, is seeing strong signs of a rebound in the Indian market, which showed flat growth during 2008 and some marginal improvement during the first quarter of 2009. Sale of notebook and desktop PCs in the last three months has exceeded our expectations, said S Rajendran, chief marketing officer, Acer India.

For the second quarter of the 2009 calendar, Acer recorded notebook sale that topped 90,000 units, as against 50,000 in the previous quarter, showing a sequential growth, 80%.

Similarly, in the desktops — a segment which has almost remained flat or even shown declining trends — it sold around 7,000 units, almost doubling its sales from the previous quarter.

According to Mr Rajendran, majority of their sales came from the consumer segment with a smaller contribution from the enterprises. The Acer official attributed this strong buoyancy in sales to an array of new products introduced in the market, stronger channel networks and streamlining its distribution setup.

According to IDC, the India PC market witnessed a 7% quarter-onquarter (QoQ) growth in shipments in first quarter of 2009 calendar year. A total of 1.67 million units of client PCs were shipped during the January-March quarter of 2009. Desktop PC shipments registered a sequential growth of 9% quarter-on-quarter while notebook PC shipments recorded a growth of 3% quarter-on-quarter.

Acer India has been following multi-products strategy with two other brands under its fold — eMachines and Gateway. This is actually enabling them to address the market at various price points with some products starting as low as Rs 10,000, the officials said. The overall PC market in India remained flat for the calendar year 2008, with the desktop segment showing a 10% drop in shipments.

Mr Rajendran said that they are cautiously optimistic of maintaining the current momentum during the course of the year with the expectation of around 30% growth.