Cell phone batteries manufactured by Nokia and Motorola have failed latest safety tests which showed they are prone to explode under certain conditions.
NEW YORK: Cell phone batteries manufactured by leading companies Nokia and Motorola have failed latest safety tests which showed they are prone to explode under certain conditions, according to a US daily.
Chinese regulators in the southern Guangdong Province, one of the world's biggest electronics manufacturing centres, were quoted by the International Herald Tribune as saying that they had found Motorola and Nokia mobile phone batteries which failed safety tests and were prone to explode under certain conditions.
The batteries were said to be manufactured by Motorola and the Sanyo operation in Beijing, and were being distributed by companies based in the Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, the paper reported.
But Motorola and Nokia -- two of the world's biggest mobile phone makers - immediately denied links to the distributors of the problem batteries, suggesting that they were counterfeit, the report said.
"All the batteries tested were not Motorola genuine batteries. They were fakes," Yang Boning, a spokesman for the company in Beijing, was quoting as saying.
"Those companies are not our suppliers," Boning added. Nokia executives, the Tribune reported, were investigating the case and trying to determine whether any of the substandard batteries affected Nokia phones.
They said they did not manufacture batteries in China and that the company had no business ties with the Chinese distributors named in the safety tests.
"We are confident this is a counterfeit product," said Eija-Riitta Huovinen, a Nokia spokeswoman in Finland.
It is unclear, the Tribune reported, whether any of the substandard and hazardous batteries entered the export market.
The announcement came just a day after China's state-controlled media reported that in June, a 22-year-old man in western China was killed after his Motorola cellphone exploded in his shirt pocket, the report said.
The man was reportedly a welder and the heat associated with the job might have touched off the explosion, the Tribune said.
But the discovery of the exploding batteries, the paper said, is already threatening to turn into another consumer product nightmare, and mounting international concerns about the quality and safety of goods being made in China.
For years, China's role as the world's factory floor has seemed to usher in an age of lower and lower prices, and helped tame inflation around the globe.
The dark side of that boom, however, has been a culture of counterfeiting or copying high-end western products, the report added.
Counterfeit products, the paper said, have been produced in China since the country's economic reforms began to take hold in the early 1980s, and everything from fake Gucci bags to counterfeit DVDs and Windows operating systems can be bought on the streets of big cities in China.
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