back to article Acer writes off $150m as audit finds 'abnormalities'

Acer CEO and Chairman JT Wang has relinquished his remuneration package including bonuses from 2010 after the firm unearthed "abnormalities" in channel inventory across EMEA that will cost it US $150m (£91m) to write off. The Taiwanese giant will also cut board directors' pay packages by 50 per cent, ask staff to take a 40 per …

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  1. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Don't punish the CEO

    Punish the CFO. He is the exec in charge of finances and the guy responsible for the money in the firm. He should pay the piper first and the CEO only if culpable.

  2. RichyS
    FAIL

    So that's...

    ...where all those crappy underpowered netbooks have gone since the iPad came out.

    Maybe they can be recycled as door-stops, or something.

    1. easyk

      I still like mine.

      I'm going to get another soon.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Shirely...

    "Acer's meteoric rise in the past decade was on the back of low-cost mobile PCs, stacked high in the channel"

    So not "Acer's meteoric rise in the past decade was on the back of fiddling the books"?

  4. Richard Pennington 1
    Headmaster

    Meteoric rise

    Meteors do not rise - they come crashing down in flames.

  5. David Dawson
    Thumb Up

    I've got an acer notebook

    Or whatever an 11.9 inch laptop is called these days.

    Its brilliant! Powerful enough to run intellij, and oracle, and full dev app server on for when I'm travelling.

    Does this screw up mean cheap kit is going to be floating around? I'd be happy to buy more like the one I've got.

    1. Mad Hacker

      Oracle? Really?

      It's interesting you feel that way considering on my Dell M6400 with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9900 @ 3.07 GHz and 4GB of RAM I found Oracle to slow the machine down too much for development. However I am running Windows 7 64bit and maybe you are running a Unix derivative that runs more efficiently.

      Seriously though what model are you that happy with?

      1. David Dawson
        Happy

        Acer aspire.

        Acer Aspire 1810TZ - 4GB system memory. from simplyacer.com, 6(ish) months ago.

        Running Kubuntu 11.04, so maybe thats the difference?

        It's not hugely fast, but thats fine for me, I don't do performance testing on the little beast, just lets me continue dev work while I'm away from the main system.

        I don't fire up oracle all that often, as most of the projects I'm on use some other database. Its useful for doing whenever I need it though, and yeah, its good enough.

    2. Robert E A Harvey
      Thumb Up

      Aye

      If there's going to be a fire sale, let us have the details please, El Reg

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Honour? Respectability?

    Can't imagine for one moment any board in the UK (private sector or publicly funded or a mixture of both) doing any thing similar to ACER board and CEO.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It happens in UK too

      The same sort of thing happened in my old company in the UK; stock was forced into the channel so much, that it is still there even though the kit is now practically obsolete, and the batteries probably barely work now. OK so the write-off was less value, but as a %age of the turn-over, significant.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Acer - Not Bad

    Laugh if you want, but we've been very pleased with our Acer kit. Son bought one to go to Uni, then I got one of those Netbook thingies, and more recently I needed a half-decent replacement laptop and Acer hit the right buttons when compared with the competition. No complaints from any quarter, does what it says on the plastic, etc.

    On the downside, I wanted a replacement operating system for the Netbook (not having saved the one that came on the hard disk when I purchased it), and they tried to stiff me for £50 plus postage. 20 quid I might have coughed at, but 50 quid meant they didn't see a penny.

    1. Danny 14

      aye

      see if you can "find" an oem installation DVD. Same code that will have come from your laptop as pretty much all OEM dvds from each OEM are the same.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Channel Inventory

    Its all done for market share. All manufacturers fudge their sales and inventory to ensure they hit their numbers. Gartner, IDC, Context etc are all given different figures from each manufacturer and they collate it and yes "Sell it Back to them". Each give false numbers so how can you trust it.

    Good job the auditors dont find everything,,,, :-0

  9. Big Bear

    @David Dawson

    What version of Oracle have you got running on the laptop? Struggled to do the same a while back, mostly around getting TNS to play nice with the onboard database as well as the networked databases on the corporate LAN...

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