Technology Reseller talks to Craig Booth, Acer’s new General Manager of UK, South Africa and the Nordics, about the PC brand’s evolving product offering and its plans to boost commercial sales with a diversified technology offering and enhanced channel support
In March, Acer celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special event at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, where the PC vendor highlighted its key achievements since 1976 and outlined a growth strategy for the new era of AI.
This strategy doubles down on its ongoing evolution from a device manufacturer into a technology solutions provider and builds on year-on-year revenue growth of 4.1% in 2025 (and 39.8% in January), which has taken Acer’s revenue back to pre-pandemic levels.
The company’s growth is being powered by rising B2B sales, which accounted for 30% of revenue in EMEA, and ‘multiple growth engines’ outside computers and displays that together made up almost one third (32.2%) of global revenues in 2025.
Growth engines include energy storage solutions, electric mobility, EV charging infrastructure and hydrogen stations, smart cities, gaming, apparel, home appliances, AI-based medical solutions, cybersecurity, cloud solutions, industrial PCs, connectivity devices, system integration, computer repair and maintenance services.
Businesses within Acer’s diversified ecosystem that have most potential from an integration perspective include Altos Computing (servers, AI infrastructure and interactive flat panel solutions), AOPEN (digital signage and edge computing), Posiflex (point-of-sale, AIoT, kiosk and industrial PCs) and Opticon (scanning solutions and electronic shelf-labelling).
Craig Booth, Acer’s new General Manager of UK, South Africa and the Nordics, believes that the combination of these growth engines, continued innovation in Acer’s core PC offering and the development of its channel will enable Acer to increase commercial sales from around 30% of total revenue to 50% within the next three years.
Potential for growth
Commercial includes areas where Acer is already very strong, especially education, but also segments where it has the potential to do better, like public sector, SMB, mid-market and enterprise.
“Of our commercial revenues, a reasonably high percentage has always been education,” explains Booth. “That’s an incredibly important sector for us. It’s something we’re proud to participate in and we want to continue to work hard with schools to bring technology into the classroom. But we’re in such a good position witheducation that our ability to grow there is quite limited.
“In public sector in certain territories, particularly those where there are aggregated purchasing schemes rather than centralised purchasing schemes, we do well. In the UK, there are not many aggregated purchasing schemes for public sector, so it’s harder to work that game. Likewise, in the private sector, in SMB and mid-market, while we have some good partnerships and routes to market and good relationships with end users, by no means is it anywhere near a good proportion of the available market.
“We value what we’ve got, but we recognise that if we want to grow, we need to have something to say about more than education, more than public sector, and everything we’re doing now, the things we talked about in Milan, our 100% loyalty to channel, bringing programmatics to the market, proof of concepts, the Synergy Partner Portal that we’ve now developed are all assets and tools designed to enable our partners to promote us better in SMB and mid-market.”
Relationship management
Booth expects growth in the commercial sector to be achieved without a corresponding decline in Acer’s retail business, which he points out ‘has been in growth and continues to grow’.
In this context, he adds that while some businesses do buy from retailstores and some retailers do service VAT‑registered organisations, there is a clear distinction between Acer’s retail partners, which it deals with directly, and resellers and MSPs which it trades with through distribution and which provide a level of service and customer engagement that commercial businesses depend on.
“VARs and MSPs are important to Acer primarily for relationship management. The end user organisations that buy our products aren’t just buying our products, they’re buying a plethora of different technologies and want a service provider that they value and respect and trust can be there if they have a problem or need help with something, whether that’s networking today, servers tomorrow or computers the day after.
“A lot of our partners do all those things and it’s important that we recognise our place in the ecosystem. Compute devices and displays may account for 15-20% of a company’s overall capex, with 80% going on other things. Our reseller partners and the distributors that serve all those needs play a key role in giving Acer an audience and giving Acer the right amount of airtime alongside all those other things end users need to buy.”
To this end, expect to see much stronger promotion of Acer’s broader ecosystem to VARs, MSPs and SIs that are well placed to make use of the company’s diversified offering to meet customer’s unique needs and, in the process, capture some of that 80% of spend.
“A lot of our growth will be underpinned by being able to say to our distribution and reseller partners that, whilst 26 compute and display and Chromebooks are core to our business and will always be core to our business, we have a lot more we can talk about. The overriding feedback from the partners we had in Milan was that they want to do more with Acer. We just need to have the right conversations with the right people.”
Strategic partners
As well as giving partners access to a greater range of Acer and Acer Group products, Acer is also talking about partner recruitment, on the reseller/MSP side and potentially also on the distribution side – in the UK, Acer’s distribution partners are TD SYNNEX and ALSO Westcoast. So, what does Booth think partners make of Acer now and how would he like them to view Acer in the future?
“It depends on the partner and the vertical,” he says. “I think our education partners see us as strategic, particularly around Chrome but also around Windows and displays. We are a significant part of that market in terms of product supply and, more importantly, we are a value partner. Our mix of product is far higher than most, if not all, of our competitors. Our ASP (average selling price) is above the market average because we don’t sell on price – we sell on value and experience.
“Outside the education vertical, we have a good reputation in SMB. We have an incredibly healthy SMB business with a couple of major retailers and there is a natural underlying demand for our brand and our product from smaller registered organisations, SOHOs and SMBs, asking retailers and e-tailers for Acer devices. We have very good relationships at that level.
“In public sector (outside education) and enterprise I don’t think many players see Acer as strategic, or have historically seen Acer as strategic, but that has been changing over the last three years. We are currently working with a huge multinational reseller on a framework of supply for one of the leading social media brands in the world. That has all been led out of the UK and the ExCos of that reseller have told us they’ve enjoyed the experience of working with us and would like to talk to us about doing more. We’ve seen that more and more over the last three years, people realising we’re a safe pair of hands, we’re a good partner and we do what we say we’re going to do.”
Immediate impact
That being the case, in what areas of the market does Booth think Acer can have an immediate impact?
“We already have a good footprint in public sector and some great relationships there, but our penetration of public sector is nowhere near where it can be.SOHO and SMB is another segment where we think we can mobilise pretty efficiently and where we are already creating a lot of velocity with our distribution partnerships. Resellers in the SMB segment don’t get a lot of TLC from OEMs and we can mobilise and pay attention to them in a way that others maybe can’t,” he says.
“Serving that market isn’t so much of an infrastructure play. Those kinds of customer aren’t necessarily looking for a domainable PC and they don’t necessarily come to market with a predetermined idea of what they want to buy. They might say ‘I need a bunch of PCs’ or ‘I need to give a new employee a PC and they’re starting on Monday morning’. That’s what I mean by velocity. You need to be responsive and able to say ‘I’ve got a product that fits your budget and your needs’ because it’s quite an urgent purchase cycle. It’s not tendering for 12 weeks, making a decision and then deploying in 12 weeks. It’s a case of ‘I need a PC and I need it now’.”
Core strengths
Booth adds that as a brand Acer has some core strengths that serve it well in addressing business markets.
“We have a competitive product, first of all, and I think that’s really important. Our challenge is not do we have a good product that could compete with the other enterprise and mid-market players. Our challenge is persuading people that we have a great product and a product that competes, both from a technological point of view and from a price point of view.
“Our product is very reliable. And we own our own service, which is really important in the commercial sphere. We have an organisation that was spun out of Acer’s services infrastructure called Enfinitec, which fundamentally is still an Acer company. We own the service infrastructure across Europe to be able to support all our partners. When you sell to a consumer, 90% of the decision, maybe more, is predicated on what the device is they’re buying and how much it is costing them. Larger scale organisations have to think about in-life management of that device and that is a much bigger percentage of the decision‑making process.
“And we are channel-only. There’s a virtue in that. We must respect the role that Acer or any computing manufacturer plays in the entire ecosystem of running IT infrastructure in an organisation. Working closely with the channel means we’re very realistic about where we sit in the ecosystem. Of course, compute devices are incredibly important and endpoint devices are incredibly important – nothing gets done without them – but equally we know they’re not the only consideration when people are managing their IT infrastructure.”
Partner portal
To help channel partners make the most of the opportunities presented by its technology offering, Acer is launching a new partner portal that is also designed to give them a better, more streamlined service. So how does this differ to what’s been available before?
“We did have a partner portal, but the maintenance of that partner portal was very difficult,” explains Booth. “It was managed locally and refreshing the content was done country by country, which is hard to do consistently and to do well. Now, we have a partner portal that is populated using a variety of clever tools. There’s a little bit of artificial intelligence in there and there are many different value points that a reseller can get access to concerning pricing, product information, deal registration, trade-ins and all the different programmatics we have that we didn’t have before.
“It’s a simple tool to engage with and navigate. We can say with a very high degree of confidence that there won’t be any information on there that is misleading. If a reseller salesperson or a distribution salesperson goes to the portal, the chances are they will very quickly be able to find what they’re looking for.
“We deployed it to distribution in Q4 because it’s easier to deploy to two PCs distributors whose salesforces we visit every single day than it is to resellers. On reseller sales floors, if a portal is hard to access or not relevant or accurate, very quickly resellers will say we don’t want to engage with this. At a country level, we’ve conducted user acceptance testing within distribution to make sure that when we do put it in front of resellers, we can be confident they’re not going to regret the engagement.
“The next step, in Q2, is to trial deployment with a handful of resellers. The theory is that everything reseller salespeople need to know to promote a product will be at their fingertips, 24/7. That’s important because the ExCos of resellers don’t want their salespeople to spend too much of their time phoning vendors and distributors to find out the information they need to sell a product; they want them to be on calls with their customers. The more we enable that process and the easier we make it to access all the information those reseller salespeople need when they’re going through the sales process, the happier the reseller ExCo will be because the salespeople are doing what they’re paid to do.”
In the meantime, Acer is having to contend with the same challenges as other PC vendors, from the impact of geopolitical events on supply chains to the effects of RAM and CPU shortages on stock levels, lead times, prices and, of course, customer demand.
“We are going to have to be very, very agile as the market proceeds and as things develop, because it’s so uncertain what’s going to happen, in terms of supply and demand,” says Booth. Another reason why an accurate, responsive partner portal is such a benefit.
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