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back to article Asus staggers into summer heatwave thirsty for sales, sweating profit

The fire raging across the traditional PC industry has reached the door of Taiwanese titan Asus - which watched its sales and profits go up in smoke. The world's fifth largest PC maker - which has done a better job than many of its peers in traversing the notebook market's shift to tabs - posted a decline in both the top and …

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  1. Dr Insanity

    Marketing

    I can't help but think that part of the problem is marketing. I am a happy owner of a Padfone 2 tablet/phone combo, and most people who see it have never heard of it. Unlike Samsung and Apple which are now household names, no-one seems to know who Asus are any more.

    My Padfone is roughly equivalent to a Galaxy S3 spec-wise, the hardware looks and feels better built, and came with a dock to turn it into a 10" tablet, all for £5 less per month than an S3. They should have been selling like hotcakes, instead I found only two places in the UK actually selling the device, and they rarely had stock. How do Asus expect to sell anything if no-one is stocking their products?

    The Transformer was one of, if not the first Android tablet with the Keyboard dock to give it a laptop form factor. The Padfone is still unique to Asus. They are outputting ideas that are different to the masses and make a lot of sense. Even the "normal" devices like the Nexus 7 are very good, solidly built pieces of kit that should compete favourably with most other manufacturers. It's a real shame not more people have cottoned onto what Asus have to offer.

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    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      ASUS & Its Products

      You are right about ASUS producting some different products. Take the eeeBox for example. An eeeBook without the KB and screen.

      Great idea but sadly far too expensive. £300+ for an EB1501. Mind you the same applies to many SFF PC's, especially Intel's NUC. Put an i& in one and you are talking close to £800. WTF!

      Why are small really quiet/fanless systems so frigging expensive?

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    2. stephajn
      Reply Icon

      Re: Marketing

      Couldn't agree with you more. Many people don't even know the exact pronounciation of the name, and so many people call Asus Acer.

      My father-in-law has a Transformer tablet with the keyboard and he absolutely loves the thing. So do I in fact and I don't even have one! If they could just get their name out there more and make people more aware of them, things might be better. As it is, your average Joe Consumer thinks that Asus is some brand new brand and doesn't even realize that they have been around for so long, and that chances are the motherboard inside of their piece of junk HP desktop is probably made by Asus!

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    3. Kunari
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Up

      Re: Marketing

      I also agree with you. I love my Asus Transformer tablet and my Asus laptop. I also have a first gen Nexus 7 but most people never heard of Asus.

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    4. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      'How do Asus expect to sell anything'....

      'if no-one is stocking their products?' .... Or if their flagship products are outright buggy... I had to return all G75VW gaming laptops I bought, because the machines were freezing several times a day requiring a hard reset. I spent countless hours trying to troubleshoot the problem, but Asus support showed no interest. They were better than this once. I literally ordered hundreds of netbooks from them in the past. I think the problem is they just want to be the next HP, so they have little time to invest in making their products solid!

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  2. Only me!
    Unhappy

    Space I want space!!!!! (well GB space)

    The reason I have not purchased a new laptop tablot or what ever they are called is simple. They are only just getting to the point where they need to be. £1000+ for a 128Gb mainly taken up by OS and programmes, leaves me nothing for the stuff I need.

    I am not a HD movie junky or have a zellian mp3s and they do not have enough storage space for me......and all I want id 256 or god forbid! 512GB of bloody disk capacity.

    In fact I think I would cough (painfully) the extra £??? for that space.

    Until then, I sit here with my old lappy that I wanted to replace well over a year ago........

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  3. goldcd

    I love their stuff

    From my motherboard to my Nexus 7. They're not 'sexy' - but they make bullet proof and excellently engineered stuff.

    I got an email from them a while ago to fill in a questionnaire about 'Asus' - from memory it had the standard are you considering buying, what do you feel about Asus, and then descended into a mess of have you heard of "really badly named consumer product" and a load of guff about how they could alter their brand image.

    If anybody from Asus is reading this. I *like* your brand image (you can take my opening sentence as your strapline if you wish). The problem is simply that I'm in the 1% of people who've ever heard of you.

    Selling components is horrible - if you do a good job, you can always be undercut on cost. Make good stuff, hand out stuff to the geeky channels to review and you'll be fine. If I had one suggestion, it's that you stop selling half a dozen 'flavours' of the same product?

    If you want to compete with Samsung and Apple, then you just need to get your stuff out there. N7 was a success as it had the google brand (OK, you're still working on that), was a great device, at a great price, with easy to understand versions (memory size & 3G - which we all understand in this iphone world).

    Just do this again. Choose a gap in the market, create a product with a few models, write off any inclination to make a profit, and flog the thing through as many channels as possible - get it into shops.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The house of cards...

    ...is ready to fall. IMO Asus has been operating on borrowed time as they expanded into many areas where they have no expertise and delivered mediocre products. You can only do that for so long before it catches up with you financially.

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