Last September, NEC, Casio Computer and Hitachi announced an agreement to merge their respective mobile phone businesses and began preparations for the launch of a new joint venture in April 2010.
As part of these preparations, the companies are proceeding in accordance with overseas competition regulations. However, supplementary documentation has been required by certain competition authorities, and additional time is necessary for their completion. Therefore, there is a possibility that the authorities' review will not be completed within March 2010. In order to minimize the influence on existing business partners, it has been decided to postpone the April launch of the new joint venture.
The new company will be called NEC CASIO Mobile Communications and is now expected to launch approximately 1 month later than originally forecasted.
At merger, the shareholders will be NEC: 66%, Casio: 17.34% and Hitachi: 16.66%, but a capital injection by NEC and Casio into the new company will change that to NEC: 70.74%, Casio: 20% and Hitachi: 9.26%. The board of directors will be made up solely of NEC and Casio representatives.
NEC currently develops and manufactures mobile terminals for NTT DoCoMo and SoftBank Mobile. In 2004, Casio and Hitachi jointly established Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications (CHMC) and provides mainly CDMA focused mobile handsets for KDDI and SoftBank Mobile in Japan as well as Verizon Wireless in the USA and LG Telecom in South Korea.
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