New Delhi: ACER Peripherals India, the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Taiwanese hardware major, will invest $10 million in India to undertake manufacturing of colour monitors, scanner and mobile phone handsets. The investment will be made over three phases. Acer will initially begin with assembling of semi-knocked down (SKD) kits, followed by localisation in the second year and later increase the production to cater to exports from India. Acer Peripherals, which set up shop in India in February this year, has been marketing a small range of PC peripherals. It has now got a government approval to set up a manufacturing plant at Pondicherry and plans to start shipping products by January-February 2001.The IT hardware major has another subsidiary in India which manufactures personal computers at its newly-set up plant in Pondicherry.Acer Peripherals would invest $2 million in the first phase and the rest within the next few months to include mobile phones and other products. It will also change its name to Acer Communications & Multimedia India and has applied for the change already.
The decision to change the name is part of a worldwide decision, said company officials. In the future, the company's name will be abbreviated to Acer CM with the group as a whole using Acer CM Group as a shortened moniker.``The new name communicates more accurately the company's positioning and emphasises our focus on telecom products and digital multimedia,'' said Acer Peripherals Asia-Pacific managing director YS Hong here at a press conference. Acer has also entered the wideband network business as well as investing in the key electronics components segments which has necessitated the change in name.
Globally, the company has said its future focus will come from the Web, wireless and wideband (WWW), besides computer peripherals, optronics and multimedia product lines.
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