Acer profits tumble

TAIPEI: Taiwan’s struggling personal computer maker Acer saw its 2015 earnings plunge by two-thirds as it announced a corporate reshuffle that separates off its new businesses, including cloud services and smart devices. Full-year net profit came in at 603.7 million Taiwanese dollars ($18.5 million), down 66 per cent from a year earlier, while revenue fell 20 per cent to 263.78 billion Taiwanese dollars, the company said on Thursday. Acer revealed in a separate statement that it would form a holding company to manage its new businesses from Friday, which it said would help speed up the ‘overall company transformation’. It did not give any detail as to whether the reshuffle would mean job losses and the company was not immediately contactable on Friday.