Gianfranco Lanci’s departure from Acer was as harsh as it was abrupt. The (now former) chief executive was effectively told to leave after two bad quarters. Prior to that, he delivered stellar growth for six years as president and three as chief executive.There is already talk that Mr Lanci was being made a scapegoat.
“The market volatility has been so big that it was literally not possible to have forecasted the sudden drop in demand,” said one analyst, who pointed out that when Lenovo replaced Bill Amelio as chief executive in 2009 it was after nearly a year of the company underperforming.
Deutsche Bank said in a note to clients that “the quick takeaway is pointing fingers and making a scapegoat out of Lanci, blaming the downward revision of sales guidance on him”, the Journal reported.
That is not to say Mr Lanci did not slip up. Acer had 12 weeks’ worth of inventories at the end of last year, double its historical average, partly because Mr Lanci kept pushing staff to meet higher sales targets. That inventory then had to be sold off cheaply at the beginning of this year, which led to another quarter of bad results.
As told by JT Wang, Acer’s chairman and now chief executive, Acer’s board had for a while been unhappy with Mr Lanci’s size-at-all-costs strategy. They wanted Acer to be more like Apple: to be more able to sell products at a premium price, and quicker to grasp changes in the market, such as the shift towards smartphones, tablets, software and services.
Mr Lanci’s miscalculation of the level of demand (in his home turf of Western Europe particularly) was simply the last straw.
There is, however, an argument to be made against Mr Lanci’s departure at this juncture. In a way it came too late – the worst of the damage from miscalculating demand was already done and Acer’s inventory levels are now back to a more normal level. The trials it faces now – rising costs squeezing margins, consumersturning to other devices – are ones also faced by every one if its competitors.
In a way it was also too early.
The lack of a tablet-optimised operating system from Google or Microsoft until recently meant that everyone besides Apple and Samsung (whose early Galaxy Tab was derided by some critics as little more than an enlarged, unwieldy phone) was late to the tablet game.
With serious competitors to iPad only launching now, the field is still wide open. Although many observers had doubts about Acer’s chances, Mr Lanci was still effectively denied the chance to prove that he could replicate in tablets Acer’s success in notebooks.
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