Acer plans 10% price hike for products sold in U.S. after tariff on China

Taipei, Feb. 18 (CNA) Acer Inc., one of the leading PC brands in Taiwan, is planning to raise the price of products made in China and sold to the United States by 10 percent in response to U.S. President Donald Trump hiking tariffs on imports from China.

Acer said on Monday that the planned 10 percent will be a default price increase based on Trump's tariff hike, confirming a report in the Daily Telegraph over the weekend citing the Taiwanese PC vendor's chairman Jason Chen (陳俊聖).

In the Daily Telegraph report, Chen said products shipped before the 10 percent tariff took effect on Feb. 4 will not be affected so the price hike will take place in the coming weeks.

"We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff," Chen said in the report. "We think 10 percent will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It's very straightforward."

The Daily Telegraph report said Acer's most expensive laptop computers cost up to US$3,700 in the U.S. market, so the price hike is expected to increase the price American consumers have to pay by hundreds of dollars.

According to American market information advisory firm Gartner, Acer was the fifth largest PC vendor in the U.S. market in the fourth quarter of last year with a 5.8 percent share, trailing U.S.-based HP Inc. (26.1 percent) and Dell Inc. (21.8 percent), China's Lenovo Group Ltd. (17.2 percent) and Apple Inc. (14.9 percent).

Asustek Computer Inc., another Taiwanese PC vendor took the sixth spot with a 5.2 percent share of the U.S. market in the fourth quarter, Gartner said.

The Daily Telegraph said almost 80 percent of notebook computers shipped to the U.S. market are made in China.

Chen also told the Daily Telegraphr that Acer is considering the possibility of different supply chains outside China, and production in the U.S. market is one of the options.

The report echoed remarks made by Chen when he spoke with Taiwanese news media on Feb. 3 that amid Trump's tariff actions, a PC brand, like Acer, has to choose a supply chain that benefits the company most by taking into consideration a range of factors, including production costs and logistics expenses, to make the most favorable choice.

Following news of the price hike, Acer shares fell 0.25 percent on the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Tuesday.