Explosive Toshiba Laptops Havent Reached Russia
Russian owners of Toshiba laptops have nothing to worry about. Japans Toshiba Corporation said it started to recall almost 5.1 thousand lithium-ion batteries manufactured by Sony for laptops. Totally, more than 340 thousand laptops of this manufacturer have been recalled since 2006.
Three incidents of laptop inflammation were registered within the September 2006 – June 2007 period: two cases in Japan, one – in Australia. Nobody was harmed.
The batteries under recall differ from those withdrawn in 2006. According to Toshiba, the laptops applying these batteries sold in Japan as well as USA, Europe, Australia and China in Dynabook, Dynabook Satellite, Satellite, and Tecra models. The batteries were manufactured in December 2005 by Sony Corporation.
In September 2006, Toshiba withdrew 1,000 batteries made by Sony for Toshiba laptops. Before that, the company had withdrawn 340 thousand laptops to replace Sony batteries posing no threat to users – they had problems with charging.
In 2006, after laptop inflammation incidents, Japans Ministry of Economy forced Sony and PC manufacturers to carry out additional consumer safety tests.
All major market players, including Acer, Dell, Apple, IBM and Lenovo, faced problems with defective batteries manufactured by Sony. Last year Sony had to recall almost 9.6 million batteries installed in its own laptops as well as in leading manufacturers ones. Sony took upon all the battery replacement related expenses that totaled $429.9 million.
Analyst calculations say, the recall initiated due to the fault of Sony made manufacturers to replace batteries in about 15% of total number of their laptops made in 2005, which makes almost 100% laptops manufactured by one of the sector leaders a year.
Sony is not the only one to have this problem. So, last year, Sanyo, another large battery manufacturer, lost 17 million due to recall of laptop and cellular phone batteries.
"These laptops were not supplied to the Russian market", - Oleg Menzhulin, PC Unit Manager in Toshiba Moscow Office, said.
Source: www.zoom.cnews.ru
