Our mobile unit ain't being flogged off, Sanyo says

SANYO'S VERBOSE PR BLOKE, Aaron Fowles has recently stumbled across the INQ. He seems to like it, but tends to send us emails whenever we mention Sanyo and these are ordinarily around twice as long as the stories themselves.

Aaron dropped us a note to say he had "a few comments" regarding our recent article about Sanyo's mobile phone unit being "flogged off".

"First of all," he notes, "while there are rumours that the mobile phone unit may be sold off, they are simply rumours at this point, and we have not announced anything to that nature. (I realise you mentioned that they were rumours, and I want to confirm to you that they are indeed rumours.)"

Mind you, we came to Aaron's attention when we mentioned that on March 27th, Sanyo put out a statement to say rumours regarding the resignation of the president of the firm, Toshimasa Iue, were false. The next day Toshimasa quit.

"Next," writes Aaron in his latest misssive, "I would like to explain a little regarding our mobile phone business and our JV with Nokia. The reason that we did not go through with the JV was simply because it was decided that both could not benefit the same from the relationship, even though we continue to have a very healthy relationship with Nokia. Our relationship with Nokia has not gone 'sour', we simply agreed not to pursue the JV any further."

Not "sour", you'll note. Just different.

"Although recent reports say that we have signed a deal with KDDI to start supplying our phones to the North American market, we have actually been in the North American market for a very long time," Aaron informs us.

"Our forecast for phone shipment for FY 2006 is approximately 3.7 million units for Japan, with 9.0 million units forecasted to be shipped overseas." Not bad for a market estimated by Strategy Analytics to be around one billion mobile phones in that year, our writer, Tone "The Phone" Dennis, noted.

"I am sharing this figure with you so you can see that we actually have more mobile phone involvement overseas than we do domestically. With this new deal with KDDI, we hope to see an increase in phone shipments overseas.

"I guess what I really want to say is that we actually have a very large network for sales overseas, and that we have no plans currently to sell our mobile phone unit."

Aaron was also keen to point out that the recalled batteries mentioned in our previous story weren't "fizzing".

"The appropriate word should have been 'swelling' or the like," he said. We hope that's clear. µ

See Also:
Sanyo's mobile division may be flogged off
Battery recall cost Sanyo $17 million