GAME ON

AFTER TURNING AROUND ACER’S FORTUNES IN JUST A FEW YEARS, CHAIRMAN AND CEO JASON CHEN SAYS THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT FOR THE ICONIC COMPUTER BRAND.

- JODIE DARLINGTON

When Jason Chen was presented with the opportunity to join Acer as CEO in 2014, the company was struggling. It had been suffering heavy losses for three years and had recently reported its worst-ever loss. “At the time, there was a lot of turmoil and the company was going through some very interesting turbulence,” Jason reflects. Yet it wasn’t enough to deter him from taking on the challenge of stepping into the top seat. “I was the fourth CEO in three months,” he adds. “I was invited by Stan Shih, who was the Co-Founder of Acer Group. When he asked me to join the company and try to turn it around, I have to say I was thinking hard about it. One of my friends said to me, ‘This is not just an icon of the industry, but also the confidence of the industry; how and why the industry will be able to continue.’ That triggered my ambition.”

Despite his initial hesitation, from the moment Jason accepted the position he never doubted that he would be successful in turning around Acer. “I had high confidence that it was a good company. It was just a matter of asking, ‘How are we going to do things differently?’” he explains.

While many CEOs in the same situation might start making big changes straightaway, Jason took a different approach. “Somebody had given me a long list of company issues that was colour-coded in terms of priority. I quickly scanned it, put in my drawer and never looked at it again,” Jason recalls, laughing. “Rather than focus on the problems, I decided to focus on the company’s strengths and opportunities.”