Battery recall not to hit us: HP, Acer

Even as the global battery recall announced by Dell and Apple has set the cat amongst the pigeons, notebook vendors in the country, including HP, Acer and HCL are rushing to reassure their customers in India that recall would not impact their brand of laptops.

“HCL notebooks are not affected by battery recall program announced by some brands, recently. Further all our notebooks go through stringent quality control for Indian conditions, as part of HCL’s `best assured’ programme,” an HCL spokesperson said.

Last week, Apple recalled 1.8 million batteries which were manufactured by Sony and used in its iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 laptop models sold between October 2003 and August 2006. The move followed a similar recall announcement by Dell of 4.1 million faulty notebook batteries.

Both recalls involved lithium-ion batteries made by a Sony Corp subsidiary in Japan, where the manufacturing process introduced metal particles into battery cells. Makers of battery cells strive to minimise or eliminate the presence of such particles, which can cause computers to short circuit, or even catch fire in some extreme situations.

While both Dell and Apple remained silent on the issue of the number of Indian consumers who are likely to be affected by the recall , other vendors operating in the Indian market —- which has seen a 144% increase in notebook sales clocking 4.3 lakh units in 2005-06 — expressed confidence that their products would not be hit by the recall controversy.

HP vice-president (Personal Systems Group for India ) Ravi Swaminathan said all the company’s products were fully tested.
“We do not expect any issue with our products. The problem globally was with the Sony battery packs, and we do not use those. Also we subject our products to a series of tests and we are confident that there is no problem with our specification,” Swaminathan said.

Another player Acer said that the affected battery units from Sony belonged to a specific model used in Apple and Dell products. “Large battery makers design batteries specific to a particular vendor, and in this case the problem was with a certain batch of 2003-2006. It does not affect our laptops,” said Acer GM (sales & marketing ) S Rajendran .