Acer will focus PC marketing in 2017 on two market-niche product lines, slim notebooks and gaming notebooks, and will launch new models beginning the first quarter, according to the company's Taiwan operations president Dave Lin.

Acer's global shipments of slim notebooks and gaming notebooks in 2016 increased 10% and 30% respectively on year.

Due to tight supply of DRAM, NAND flash, display panels and SSDs, Acer's PC production costs in the first quarter of 2017 are estimated to rise 3-5% on quarter, Lin said. Acer will absorb the increased cost and will not hike PC prices for the time being, Lin indicated. In addition, Acer will increase the shipment proportion for notebooks equipped with 4GB RAM and decrease that for models equipped with 8GB RAM to reduce the impact of the cost increase, Lin noted.

Acer will launch Predator 21X, a 21-inch gaming notebooks featuring Thunderbolt 3, and a RAID 0 configuration of up to four 512GB SSDs and a 1TB 7,200RPM hard disk drive, in the Taiwan market in March. In addition, Acer will launch high-end gaming Predator 17X, Predator 17 and Predator 15 models as well as mainstream gaming V-Nitro 17, V-Nitro 15, VX15 and VX5-591G models.