Acer took less than two weeks to re-produce notebooks with fixed Intel Sandy Bridge chipsets and ship them to retail channels worldwide; leading all other global brands, mainly due to the company's strong execution ability, according to Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin.

After the company received fixed chipsets from Intel on February 17, related motherboards were already starting to ship to ODM partners by February 19 and these partners started to ship finished notebooks on February 23; about 3,000 units were shipped to Taiwan. After finishing the related customs work during Taiwan's holidays between February 26-28, the new Sandy Bridge notebooks were able to appear in Taiwan's retail channel on March 1, the earliest among notebook brands, Lin detailed.

Commenting on the new platform, Lin believes that Sandy Bridge's better performance and lower power consumption, as well as its lower price gap with its predecessor, should help drive up demand from consumers.

Sources from retail channels also pointed out that Acer's initial batch of Sandy Bridge notebooks are currently seeing good sales, and the notebook industry should gradually recover from the incident starting March.

Lin also mentioned that Acer's new Timeline notebooks will soon hit the market and the new models will focus on improving their ultra-thin design, battery life and sound. As for tablet PCs, Acer will start launching models in March or April in Taiwan. Acer Taiwan has already prepared about 500 Windows 7-based models targeting he enterprise and education markets, and will sell them via telecom carriers in Taiwan.