The location that used to matter was someplace in Neihu, Taipei’s northeastern technological district, where residential skyscrapers and industrial parks clash and traffic rushes in the stop-start rhythm of a city that developed its roadways more quickly than its planning. For the majority of its existence, E-Ten Information Systems, a company with several hundred employes, had offices there. During the mid-2000s, the company sold hardware to tech enthusiasts in Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia who were interested in things like GPS chipsets in a phone-sized device and HSDPA speeds. The address became irrelevant when Acer showed up with a check for almost $275 million.
Taiwan’s larger technological story was condensed into E-Ten’s trajectory. The company, which was founded in 1985, gained its early notoriety by enabling Chinese-language input on MS-DOS computers—a task that may seem simple today but was actually rather challenging back then. Hundreds of millions of prospective users had been effectively excluded by the early personal computers’ Latin alphabet-oriented architecture. E-Ten managed to get it unlocked. As the PC industry developed, Taiwanese technology companies continuously excelled at this kind of unglamorous problem-solving: making existing technology work for people it wasn’t built for. This provided E-Ten the engineering reputation to expand into neighboring markets.
E-Ten changed their focus to Windows Mobile smartphones under the Glofiish brand around the middle of the 2000s. The handsets were competitively specified, capable, and marketed mostly online and thru specialty merchants in European nations where Windows Mobile phone enthusiast communities had developed their own fan bases. When placed next to a comparable HTC device, a Glofiish X500 provided comparable specs at a lesser cost. That was the E-Ten pitch, and it was effective for a targeted and interested audience. In 2007, the business received a Computex award. The items received severe reviews in the European and British press. There was a legitimate business there, however small.
E-Ten lacked the distribution power to compete at the carrier level, where the actual volume of smartphone transactions took place. With agreements with Vodafone, T-Mobile, and O2, Nokia and HTC were able to place their smartphones in high-street retailers under carrier branding with discounted prices and marketing assistance. E-Ten was selling to those who were already familiar with Windows Mobile, either directly or thru Expansys. At a certain scale, that is a sustainable business. When businesses with fundamentally different resources begin to colonize the category it serves, it will not be able to survive.
It made sense for Acer to purchase E-Ten in March 2008 as a time-buying strategy. After a string of acquisitions, including the $710 million purchase of Gateway in 2007, Acer was the third-largest PC manufacturer in the world at the time of the acquisition, after HP and Dell. Every significant hardware manufacturer has to enter the smartphone industry because to its rapid growth, and it takes years to develop a smartphone engineering competency from the ground up. By purchasing E-Ten, Acer acquired a portfolio of manufacturing partnerships that had taken years to build, as well as about a hundred engineers who already knew how to create Windows Mobile phones. A year after the acquisition concluded, Aymar de Lencquesaing, the mobile head of Acer, was profiled by Forbes, which detailed how that 100 engineers had grown to 200 across Taipei, California, and Europe, operating with the freedom of a startup embedded within a larger firm. Theoretically, the framework made sense.
When the market for smartphones changed in the eighteen months following the acquisition, the theory failed. Nine months prior to Acer finalizing the E-Ten agreement, the iPhone was introduced in June 2007. The purchase closed in October 2008, the same month Android made its market debut. Within two years, a platform struggle that demanded scale that neither E-Ten nor Acer could match replaced the competitive environment that E-Ten had been negotiating, which was centered around Windows Mobile and specialized hardware buyers.
Using E-Ten’s engineering expertise and manufacturing know-how, Acer introduced the Liquid series of Android smartphones, achieved a moderate degree of commercial presence in some markets, and by 2014 had left the smartphone market as a significant category. Eventually, the engineering and intellectual property assets were merged into the larger Acer company, which was listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange with the ticker 2353. As a result, they were no longer visible in any further disclosures.
The intriguing aspect of E-Ten’s afterlife isn’t the Acer mobile strategy’s failure, which had a number of contributing factors, of which E-Ten’s acquisition was just one. It’s fascinating how a company with several hundred employes that has been in business for more than 20 years and created gadgets that people actually like may entirely vanish from recognition. Not insolvent. Not closed. purchased, incorporated, diluted into a bigger balance sheet, and then just vanished. Presumably working on other projects, the engineers who created the Glofiish X500 are still out there. E-Ten’s patents were incorporated into Acer’s portfolio. The address in Neihu has changed. Somewhere in someone’s archive lies the 2007 Computex prize. Considering how well this particular story resolved itself, it seems that the tech sector is adept at absorbing its own past.
