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Acer Aims to More Than Triple Phone Sales in 2011 to 10 Million

By Simon Thiel and Tim Culpan

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Acer Inc., the world’s second- largest laptop computer supplier, aims to sell 10 million mobile phones next year, up from a 2010 target of 3 million.

“We push aggressively into the mobile-phone market and it’s working nicely,” Gianfranco Lanci, president of Taipei- based Acer, said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain today.

Acer, the fastest-growing major computer supplier according to Gartner Inc., bought smartphone maker E-ten Information Systems Co. last year to enter the market for handsets that can access the Internet. The company sold 500,000 handsets since it started shipping mobile phones last year, Lanci said.

The company will continue to win market share and will still be able to keep its current profit margin of about 15 to 20 percent in the mobile-phone business, Lanci said. “We have done the same thing in the laptop market, we know how to keep costs under control and operate efficiently,” he said.