Acer India announces foray into retail distribution

Acer India has announced its entry into the retail market. The company
announced the opening of the first of its retail stores across the country.
According to the company, by the end of January 2004, it plans to have 50 Acer
Malls and Acer Point stores in all at various locations including Coimbatore,
Lucknow, Cochin, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and
the four metros.

According to the company release, every Acer store will carry the Aspire
series of consumer PCs and the TravelMate notebook series. Retailers will have a
choice in displaying other Acer categories such as TFT monitors, projectors and
other multi-functional personal devices. The Acer Malls will also be the
preferred retail dis-tributors for the recently launched Acer Ferrari 3000
notebook.

Acer’s retail stores will fall into three categories. The first will be the
full shop or ‘Acer Mall’ which will comprise of Acer products and
non-competing products. In the second category, one section of the store will
display Acer products and in the third category, one corner of the store will
exhibit Acer products. The second and third category stores will be known as ‘Acer
Points.’

Acer will provide the store owners with branding and visual merchandising for
the stores in the form of standees, banners and external and internal signage.
In addition, Acer has also engaged the services of a professional retail design
company, Prime Site (a division of Mudra Communications Pvt Ltd), to provide
uniform branding and merchandising across the stores. Acer will also train store
sales executives at every retail outlet under its Acer Certified Sales
Professional (ACSP) program.

"Acer has always been at the forefront of offering consumers innovative
quality products at competitive prices. Our retail ince-ntives to our partners
are compelling and attractive and we expect to triple the number of stores by
the end of 2004," said S Rajend-ran, GM (Sales & Marketing-consumer
product group), Acer India.

Acer will partner with its existing partners, who have the location primacy
advantage, market share and acceptability in their market region for the
remaining stores.

CyberMedia News Service

Bangalore