Taiwan's Acer is buying Gateway Inc. for $710 million, edging past China's Lenovo Group which bought IBM's PC business two years ago. Acer said it will maintain Gateway and eMachine as separate brands in the U.S., at least for now.
Gateway bought eMachines Inc. in 2004, creating what was then the third-largest PC maker in the American market, behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
Lenovo had been the world's third-biggest PC company, behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell, almost continuously since it bought the PC unit of IBM in 2005. The Beijing Government is the largest shareholder in Lenovo through the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (Source: Tom Bawden and Sarah Butler The Times, Aug 28; consumeraffairs.com.aug 29, 2007).