Taiwan to fill the battery gap

IT´S BEEN virtually impossible to miss the laptop battery recall stories - which The INQ broke, anyway. Dell and Apple between them need at least 5.8 million replacement batteries.

The snag is that there´s already a worldwide shortage of lithium-ion batteries. Sony, the source of the recalled batteries, isn´t even the world Number One supplier of Lithium-ion batteries. That honour goes to Sanyo, followed by Panasonic (Matsushita).

While there will obviously be a mad scramble to repair the damage done to Apple and Dell´s reputation - what about other devices? There´s a growing number of consumer electronic products which are reliant on them. Camcorders, digital cameras and MP3 players are obvious examples? Are iPOD batteries made by Sony too, the INQ wonders?

Anyway, one of the obvious products way down the food chain for lithium-ion batteries is, of course, the mobile phone. So where are handset manufacturers going to source their batteries from, now the Japanese look vulnerable? Taiwan, of course.

The Sony battery fiasco may have done deeper damage than most observers seem to recognise. ´The label - ´Made in Taiwan´ used to be associated with ´cheap and cheerful´. But the same was true of ´Made in Japan´ 40 years ago.

Taiwan could well take advantage of this weakness to establish a well deserved reputation for high quality electronic products. Especially since this isn´t the first laptop battery disaster. Compaq had to recall Sony laptop batteries back in October 2000 through fears of overheating.

To date, stories about mobile phones catching fire have chiefly been restricted to suspect replacement batteries being passed off as the genuine article. So, given the worldwide shortage of lithium-ion batteries, be careful where you decide to purchase your replacement phone battery. µ

See also What will happen to the recalled batteries?