Acer Group’s R&D Strategy – the China Decision Strategic Outsourcing at Bharti Airtel Limited

Acer Group’s R&D Strategy – The China decision

Strategic Outsourcing at Bharti Airtel Limited

“The concept of absolute cost advantage leads us to believe that successful firms ultimately locate in the lowest cost environment (or country) for their business. Compare the Acer and Bharti Airtel cases (and relevant materials) to either agree or disagree with this view.”

I disagree with this statement as we can see in both cases for Acer and Bharti Airtel firms are not only concerned about locating their business in the lowest cost environment but in the environment that can provide also more competitive advantage to their business. The concept of absolute cost advantage tells us that companies will choose the a party that can produce more of the same good or service than competitors using the same amount of resources, but the concept does not includes the importance of knowledge and technology for the business specially when R&D is very important for both cases.

ACER

For ACER, investment in R&D always played a pivotal role in the development of the company strategy and the company always focused in providing affordable technology to every segments of the market. Innovation is considered to be one of the most important strategies for the company differentiation from competitors and that’s one of the main reasons why the R&D plays a pivotal role for the company.

For Stan Shin, the founder and chairman of Acer Group, the importance of intellectual propriety was always there and for that reason the company itself invested in what is called “Aspire Park” where people who lived there could constantly share ideas and in this way contribute to a better R&D development. In other hand, in order to increase competitiveness and access to knowledge they also forged strategic joint ventures with other Taiwanese software developers and invested in other R&D location in California, Silicon Valley. The company chose to locate one of the R&D...