Toshiba recalls additional 1400 Sony-made laptop batteries

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 8/13/2007

Nearly one year after prompting a major consumer recall at Dell Inc., Sony Corp.'s defective lithium ion battery packs have prompted yet another consumer recall, this time for Japan-based PC maker Toshiba Corp.

Marking the second of such recalls at Toshiba alone within the past two months, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) last week announced a voluntary recall of some 1,400 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries containing Sony cells used in Toshiba notebook computers.

The defective lithium-ion batteries have been shown to overheat, posing a fire hazard. According to the CPSC, Toshiba has received three reports outside of the United States of notebook batteries overheating. No injuries have been reported.

The batteries were sold with Toshiba's Satellite A100, Satellite A105 and Tecra A7 laptop models, which were sold from January 2006 through April 2006. 

For months, Sony has been struggling to recover from its lithium-ion manufacturing mishaps, which triggered large-scale battery recalls over the past year at Dell, Apple Inc., Lenovo Inc., Acer America Corp., and others. In June, Toshiba announced it was implementing further measures to renew its commitment to publicizing the battery recall, after an incident on May 24 when the company announced that a Toshiba portable computer with a Sony battery pack caught fire.

For the most part, however, Sony's bottom line has emerged from the ongoing battery recall turmoil relatively unscathed.  On July 26, the company announced its fiscal Q1 earnings report, with sales of $16.75 billion ( 1.97 trillion Japanese yen), up 13.3 percent year-over-year. The company posted Q1 income of $535.2 million (63.14 billion yen), more than doubling the income it took in for Q1 2006.