NEC shoots for China camera phones

NEC aims to sell 3 million camera phones in China by the 2004 business year

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HONG KONG, China (Reuters) -- NEC Corp., Japan's largest cell-phone maker, said it will start shipping camera-equipped handsets to China this month and aimed for rapid growth in shipments to one million units in the next business year.

The handsets will employ the GSM/GPRS (global system for mobile/general packet radio service) standard, which is used by China Mobile (Hong Kong), the world's largest mobile carrier with more than 109 million subscribers.

"Our target is to ship three million camera phones to China in the 2004/05 (April/March) business year," a spokeswoman said.

She declined to give a revenue target but said a report of 100 billion yen ($810 million) payment for three million handsets appeared to be excessive.

The spokeswoman also said the newspaper had mistakenly reported that the target was for 2005 instead of 2004/05. China Mobile said separately that NEC was one of several suppliers from which it had ordered a total of 300,000 handsets as part of a promotion for its advanced multimedia service.

Half a million phones by March

NEC's initial models will aim at the high end of the market with a 100,000-pixel built-in camera, a 2.2-inch color screen and a second one-inch color screen on the back of the phone.

The company hopes to supply 500,000 handsets to the Chinese market during the current fiscal year to next March. In China, the world's largest wireless market in terms of the number of subscribers, 4.5 million to five million handsets are sold each month.

Japan's handset makers, which long focused on the domestic market with its unique wireless standards, have begun moving abroad in hopes that advanced features such as built-in cameras will catch on overseas as spectacularly as they have at home.

NEC shares ended Thursday trade down 1.29 percent at 458 yen, compared with a 1.17 percent drop in the Nikkei average . NEC's shares, like those of many of Japan's chip and electronics conglomerates, have slid steadily in recent days, repeatedly setting fresh two-decade lows as worries mount over the Japanese and global economies.

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