DoCoMo:To Resume Sales Of Mitsubishi Electric Cellphones

TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- NTT DoCoMo said Friday it would resume sales this weekend of mobile phones made by Mitsubishi Electric that were suspended Dec. 7 due to faulty batteries.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile phone carrier by subscribers, said in a press release that sales of the phones would resume Saturday because a sufficient supply of replacement batteries were now available.

Sales of the handsets were halted after some of their battery packs, which are made by a subsidiary of Sanyo Electric, were found to overheat and crack during recharging.

NTT DoCoMo has been replacing the battery packs of the phones, and a company spokesman said of the 1.3 million units in use, about 880,000 had been replaced as of Jan. 23.

The suspension led to slower sales for Mitsubishi Electric during the lucrative holiday shopping season, typically a key time for mobile phone sales in Japan. The company has said it is considering asking Sanyo to pay for lost revenue.

The batteries involved are lithium-ion models, the same technology associated with a Sony recall of up to 9.6 million laptop computer battery packs it supplied to the world's biggest computer makers, triggering huge costs that contributed to a 94% plunge in its net profit for the July-September quarter.

-By Jay Alabaster, Dow Jones Newswires; 813-5255-2929; jay.alabaster@dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires "

Posted to the site on 26th January 2007