Acer has once again welcomed us to its global headquarters during COMPUTEX 2025, however, this year’s approach departs from past formats, offering deeper insight into the company’s collaborative design philosophy and regional growth strategies.
Before formal interviews began, we were guided through the “A Corner” experience – an orientation that highlighted Acer’s design collaboration with IDEO. The centerpiece was the Acer Design Space, a specialized workshop outfitted with CNC machines and rapid prototyping tools, enabling cross-disciplinary teams to co-create and iterate product concepts at speed.
Acer also detailed its approach to user-informed design via focus groups comprising gamers from varied backgrounds. These sessions have helped shape the evolution of the Predator lineup, including feedback-driven refinements to iconic models like the Predator 21X.
Once initial feedback is gathered, design samples are produced for further testing and validation, forming a key loop in the company’s product development cycle. Alongside this, standard practices like market research, competitive analysis, and customer voice studies remain core components in product planning.
The main session featured an in-depth interview with Andrew Hou, President of Acer Pan Asia Pacific (PAP), offering a closer look at Acer’s regional performance and forward-looking strategies.
According to Hou, Acer’s Malaysian operations saw a significant upswing in Q4 2024, boosted by the momentum of the 2025 Predator League. Total notebook market share in the country hit 20%, with gaming laptops claiming a notable 30%. Korea also recorded substantial revenue gains during the same period.
One standout statistic: while the industry average revenue contribution from the education segment sits at 12%, Acer has achieved 22%, thanks in part to its success in securing major institutional tenders and delivering end-to-end education technology solutions.
Aside from these new insights, Acer recapped announcements shared earlier during the 2025 Predator League launch, ensuring attendees who missed the esports event were brought up to speed.
Below is the Q&A session with the team.
Q: You have shown that the overall market share has increased, so can you share some strategies in terms of expanding in Japan?
A: Japan is a tough market due to the problem with U.S tariff and the shifting exchange rate of Yen, yet Acer as a brand itself relies on expanding business through different product category, and if you knew about how Acerpure blew up in Japan last year, then you’ll know and understand, and we are confident that we can do it again with another segment entry.
Q: Do you expect Asia and SEA to become even more important starting this year?
A: When the U.S tariff changes start, brands that rely on Chinese manufacturing will be unable to ship to the U.S anymore. Therefore, they will shift their sales focus to other places such as the SEA regions. And if the ecosystem moves, regions that welcomed this investment will be able to get more job opportunities than a growing GDP, resulting in increased consumer demand. Therefore, Acer would like to stay strong and continue to capture market share with our unique strategies.
Q: What do you think of AI technology getting diversified and even becoming localized for specific requirements?
A: I think we IT companies need to thank AI for saving COMPUTEX in a way, as before gen-AI was a thing, the event actually had its numbers diminished over the years. But 2024 and this year, 2025, say otherwise. Anyway, since AI has helped users to shift from “searching for something” to just “asking for something”, it has changed the way people think about and use AI. Therefore, we want to help users approach AI in one way or another, from consumer-friendly “helping hand” features to powerful software suites such as AiWorks that can split GPU resources even if it is only a single unit, provided by our industrial computing subsidiary, Altos Computing, via the new HGX and MGX servers.
Q: How can Acer stand out from the rest of the competition when almost everyone can push out a Copilot+ PC?
A: Since Copilot+ is from Microsoft, we really can’t overwrite the functions provided by them, but I think that Acer has many little tools that can provide the same thing for our users. While AI tools right now are for generic use, it can become highly specific and tailored to professionals, which we will follow up with our own improvements.
Q: Are you still investing in SpatialLabs?
A: Yeah, we are still going it and competitors seem to be doing as well. However, we felt that the technology has little market share in gaming right now, but the professional field, such as medical use, has been growing. Therefore, we are pushing in that direction to build the business pipeline first, and we’ll advance quickly in the consumer space when the timing is right.
Q: For the new Acer Gadget, are we seeing a new ecosystem involving them, or is it a separate one?
A: When we diversify into different categories, we all try to build relevancy between different families and products. We thought of controlling e-bikes from Iconia tablets, but we really haven’t touched this network for now. But we try to expand first, then see later.
Q: Indonesia has acquired the top spot for educational laptop market share. Is it Chromebook only? And how do you plan to maintain this piece of the cake?
A: First off, not only are Chromebooks doing well, but we also have large touch screen displays, workstations, PCs, servers, and more – A total solution if you will. But our ability to win so many projects and tenders is attributed to our commitment to the TKDM policy to set up a local manufacturing plant. Since the investment has allowed us to churn out products at a faster rate, it has allowed us to build a lot of different products within this single factory.
Q: It is super interesting to see Acer Gadget with the debut of the FreeSense Ring and AI TransBuds product. What do you expect from this new venture?
A: At the beginning of 2025, we think that this is going to be the year for edge devices and associated AI. And we think that the entire industry is going to gun for this segment. Therefore, we are going in early instead of late with a ring, which is still unsaturated, and specialized earbuds, which are crafted for a specific purpose.
Q: It is also interesting to see ultra-light laptops debut recently. Will this trend continue in terms of its legitimacy?
A: Although it is hard to imagine until you experience it first-hand, the idea was born during the COVID-19 times, but due to that thing, the entire industry decided to delay it. Additionally, if we just randomly remove parts and reduce material quality to reduce the weight, it just makes the entire device worse. So, we made sure to carefully balance the design and things like battery life, etc.
Q: With cloud AI services charging a subscription premium, it seems that Acer’s approach for on-device AI is heading in the opposite. Will you continue to commit to this?
A: The way we design our AI features is that we have to let users know that their machines are capable of doing “X” and “Y” as well as the capabilities of these functions, but we also don’t want to alienate users through gatekeeping, or stopping users from accessing tools that can perform better than our offerings. As we just want to help users approach AI in a simple way, we don’t plan to make money out of these at all for the time being.
Q: With other brands like Xiaomi and Huawei getting very good at shaping their own ecosystem. Will you be following this approach as well?
A: No actually, because we want to, at the very least, create a product that can work on its own without any dependency on other products. And if possible, we want our things to work with partner ecosystems through wide compatibility. Therefore, we are not going the “closed loop” way.
Q: While the general consensus on Chromebook is negative, you guys actually made it work to earn revenue from it. What do you think of the trend in the future?
A: While we do work closely with Google in providing Chromebook-based solutions, we still work closely with partners like Microsoft in Windows. Our customers are smart in knowing what to pick based on their requirements, so we think that we can run more promotions in the SEA region to help more untapped customer bases learn about our solutions.
Q: Since the new ProCreator monitor is a new series, will we see more products under that name coming in, like ProCreator desktop GPU?
A: Not now actually, since we have found out that creators are more likely to use thin and light laptops since they are moving around, the AMD Ryzen AI MAX series processors actually have enough horsepower in CPU, GPU, and NPU to give them what they one.
Q: If so, can we expect ProCreator monitors-embedded AIO desktops in the future?
A: It’s a good idea, but we haven’t pushed it into official discussions. In the meantime, we are doing FHD144Hz models as well as QHD200Hz variants for easy one-machine gaming setups.
Q: Will you be increasing the use of recycled materials not only for the Vero series but also across the entire portfolio?
A: Yes, we will, and it is already underway.
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