Acer appoints chip veteran Jason Chen as CEO

Acer has appointed a semiconductor industry sales veteran as its new leader, its third this year in the latest shuffle of musical chairs in management.

The troubled PC Taiwanese PC maker has appointed Jason Chen as corporate president and CEO from January 1, 2014, according to a statement on Monday. He is currently the senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and previously worked at Intel.

Chen takes over from company founder Stan Shih, who had stepped up just last month as chairman and interim corporate president to fill the gap after CEO-designate Jim Wong quit in end-November. Wong's resignation came less than a month of his appointment to the top job vacated by J.T. Wang in early November, who spent two years at the helm.

Their departures were attributed to the worse-than-expected quarterly losses of T$13.12 billion (US$446 million) for the June-September period, which had prompted the the company to announce a 7 percent reduction in its workforce. Acer had then blamed the losses on a rise in inventory levels and one-off payments related to longstanding litigation.
Acer has been struggling to get back into the black in recent quarters, and is just one of the PC vendors hit by the switch to more mobile devices. In July, then-CEO Wong had admitted to underestimating the potential of tablet computers.