Hitachi : Japan's Hitachi to stop making most home computers

TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's Hitachi Ltd said Tuesday that it will stop making most personal computers (PCs) amid heated price competition with foreign rivals.

The company already outsources production of business computers to US maker Hewlett-Packard and will continue to sell those products, said a Hitachi spokesman.

"We will not develop normal, consumer-use personal computers and will focus our resources on new products, namely televisions with PC functions or PCs that can show television programs," he said.

Hitachi will maintain production of special business-use computers, such as ones without hard disks, the spokesman said, without elaborating further.

Hitachi, which helped pioneer PC development in Japan, decided that making the business profitable would be difficult, the Nikkei newspaper said.

Japanese IT manufacturers have struggled to compete in a tough global market against international giants such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Acer.

Hitachi makes PCs only for the Japanese market and has been seeing a decline in shipments ever since they peaked at about 700,000 units in 2001, the Nikkei business daily said.