About three months ago, Gianfranco Lanci flew into San Francisco International Airport, got off the plane and made his way to the passport control stations. As he pulled out his documents, the passport agent immediately recognized him as the chief executive of Acer.
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It was the first time in my life that has ever happened, he said.
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Mr. Lanci may need to come to grips with his growing celebrity. After all, he has turned Acer, the personal computer seller based in Taiwan, into a finely tuned organization that is obliterating some of the computing industry’s longest-standing traditions and leading Taiwan’s charge up the technology food chain.
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Acer appears poised to overtake Dell this year as the world’s second-largest seller of personal computers, which would put a real dent in one of America’s favorite business stories.
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If that happens, Acer will trail only Hewlett-Packard; no computer company based outside the United States has ever climbed so high.
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That is a big achievement, and they have beaten the odds, said Roger L. Kay, a PC industry analyst and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm. Acer is a real comer.
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And so is Taiwan. Giants like Foxconn and Quanta have turned this island into a manufacturing hub, producing most of the music players, video game consoles, mobile phones and computers bought by consumers and businesses.
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But the companies that sell those products — H.P., Dell, Apple and others — have put immense pressure on the manufacturers to keep prices low.
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So business leaders and the Taiwanese government are urging local companies to think bigger. As a result, many have set out to become household names around the world, to nurture their software businesses and to own more essential intellectual property in fast- growing parts of the technology industry.
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Most of the companies in Taiwan are slaves to the boom-and-bust cycles,…