Japanese high-tech giant Fujitsu said today that a defective Sony-made battery pack sent off sparks in one of its laptop computers for the first time, amid a global recall of similar batteries.
The user of the computer suffered a slight burn on the hand, in the incident in Japan on Tuesday, said Fujitsu spokesman Toshiaki Koike.
Fujitsu was in the process of replacing 51,000 Sony-made battery packs in addition to 287,000 already recalled.
It was the first such incident in Japan. US computer makers Del and Apple and China's Lenavo have also reported overheating incidents involving Sony batteries.
As many as 9.6 million Sony-made lithium-ion batteries are being recalled by a host of computer markers.
Sony, which had just been recovering from a soft patch, said earlier this week that it had tumbled into the red in the second quarter due to the costs of the battery recall.
Fujitsu and Sony jointly investigated the latest incident and 'reached a common understanding' that the battery pack itself was the cause of the heat and sparks, Fujitsu said in a statement.
'At the moment, we are investigating the cause in detail,' it said. 'We considered the incident to be an extremely rare phenomenon.'
The statement advised users to operate computers by detaching Sony-made batteries. It asked users to detach AC adapters and place computers in normal temperatures and not on carpets, sofas or other spots which tend to be easily heated.
