Executives at Acer, the world's fourth-largest PC vendor, will take a 30 per cent pay cut after the company reported a larger than expected net loss on its flagship products.
While other manufacturers, such as HP and Lenovo, have changed tactics in recent months - aiming towards enterprise PCs, servers and the cloud - Acer has attempted to strike out alone focusing on consumer sales and budget releases.
The Taiwanese PC maker, which made its name in the low-end notebook market, has routinely reported weak earnings in recent years due to the explosive popularity of smartphones and tablets.
Acer has attempted to respond to this threat in recent times with its own low-priced tablets, smartphone and Ultrabook designs. It has been tough going to enter a market where competition is stiff from the likes of Apple, Samsung and Microsoft, and a number of Acer's models have been less than inspiring.
"Quick, to the cloud!"
Effectively pointing out their mistakes, a company spokesperson said in statement: "Acer acknowledges missteps in the past on resource allocation and the over expectation of Ultrabooks and notebooks with touchpanel".
The acknowledgement may have come too late, however, with the company making a loss of almost $1 billion (£600 million, AU$1.1 billion) in the third and fourth quarters of 2013, more than double its expected margins according to Thomson Reuters.
The company haven't responded with many details on how it intends to turn its fortunes around. So far, the PC maker has said it plans to develop personalised cloud products that will connect its notebooks, tablets and smartphones.
This seems like another market Acer may have trouble penetrating successfully, with a number of big companies, including IBM, Intel and Microsoft gearing themselves up to become big players in the cloud market. Hopefully for Acer, later this year we won't be seeing another confession of a misstep on cloud computing too.
