This article is more than 1 year old

Acer fairly sure it made a profit in Q1. Assuming it got the office tea-bag account right

'Numbers speak for themselves' insists spokesbeing. Er, quite

Ailing Acer has told us "transformation plans" are on track despite generating a profit after tax of just NT$1m - or £19,600 - in the first calendar quarter of 2014.

This titchy cash haul would cover a small bunch of non-golden parachutes for execs that want to bale: or equates to a £2.80 handout for each employee in the company to spend on, er, a sandwich or a big bag of crisps.

The Taiwanese PC maker has yet to fully recover from 2010's collapse in demand for netbooks and entry-level lappies or find a way to produce 'slabs that compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung.

The company has reported quarterly losses or minuscule profits ever since 2011 when it claimed to have discovered $150m worth of ageing stock in Spanish warehouses and wrote it down, a financial process it undertook again last year with raw materials.

Sales for the period from January to March came in at NT$76.72bn (£1.5bn), down 16 per cent on the NT$91.9bn posted a year ago. Revenues were down 11.4 per cent on $86.7bn filed in Q4.

After three consecutive quarters of losses, operating income came in at NT$127m (£2.5m) versus an operating loss of NT$8.2bn (£166m) for Q4 and higher than the NT$29m (£632k) a year ago.

The firm said this was due to "effective control of inventory and costs, stabilising gross profit, and other factors".

The existing board approved the cancellation of 55.6 million treasury stocks, resulting in new equity capital of NT$27.8bn.

Joint founder Stan Shih returned to Acer as chairman last autumn but is set to retire again from next month. He has however been made one of the board nominees to be re-elected on 18 June.

The others include the other founder George Huang, along with CEO Jason Chen, Stan's wife Caroline Yeh, former CFO Philip Peng and Hsin-Yi Lin, a former chairman of the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

A spokesman told The Channel that it had no further commentary on the results, "I think the numbers speak for themselves. We are making progress on our turnaround plans". ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like