Another consumer product disaster in China: exploding mobile phone batteries
SHANGHAI: After concerns over pet food, toothpaste, seafood and defective tires, China may now have to cope with another consumer product disaster: exploding mobile phone batteries.
Chinese regulators in the southern Guangdong Province, one of the world's biggest electronics manufacturing centers, said this week that they had found Motorola and Nokia mobile phone batteries that 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 - one of China's biggest export centers.
It is unclear whether any of the substandard and hazardous batteries entered the export market. The announcement came just a day after China's state-controlled news 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 man was reportedly a welder and the heat associated with the job might have touched off the explosion.
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.
"All the batteries tested were not Motorola genuine batteries. They were fakes," said Yang Boning, a spokesman for Motorola in Beijing. "Those companies are not our suppliers."
Nokia executives said they were investigating the case and trying to determine whether any of the substandard batteries affected Nokia phones. Nokia officials 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.
But the discovery of the exploding batteries is already threatening to turn into another consumer product nightmare, and helping fuel 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 - powering one of the greatest economic growths stories in history.
The dark side of that boom, however, has been a culture of counterfeiting or copying high-end western products.
Counterfeit products have been produced here 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.
But now, perhaps for the first time, cheap and sometimes counterfeit products from China are beginning to look increasingly dangerous or even deadly.
Exports of tainted pet food ingredients this year set off one of the biggest pet food recalls in U.S. history, possibly killing or injuring as many as 4,000 cats and dogs, according to American regulators.
Cough medicine laced with a mislabeled industrial chemical from China called diethylene glycol might have killed as many as 100 people in the Dominican Republic last year.
A few weeks ago, a U.S. company recalled about 450,000 Chinese made tires because they did not contain a major safety feature, which could prevent tire treads from splitting and falling apart.
The recall occurred after a lawsuit blamed the Chinese-made tires for an accident that resulted in the death of two passengers in the United States.
China has responded to the public relations disasters in recent months with a massive effort to reassure global investors, customers and consumers at home that "Made in China" is not a warning label.
Regulators have announced efforts to overhaul food safety regulations, to introduce a national recall system and to revamp the nation's top drug regulator. In recent months, China's leading quality regulation agency dispatched more than 30,000 inspectors on a nationwide sweep to find counterfeit and substandard foods, drugs and consumer products.
The government has all along insisted that most of its products are safe and of high quality, and warned the media not to create a panic.
But the government has announced the results of some of its inspections, and they are startling: 20 percent of the nation's food and consumer products are substandard or tainted, the government said this week.
Food is laced with industrial chemicals, formaldehyde, industrial wax and dangerous coloring dyes; baby clothes are contaminated with dangerous chemicals, children's snack food is doused with excessive amounts of preservatives and old food waste is repackaged and sold as new.
Worried about a backlash among Western consumers, global corporations are now upgrading their own inspections, and worrying about the potential for a massive recall after RC2 announced that its popular Thomas & Friends toy railway sets were coated with lead paint. That forced the recall of 1.5 million toys.
Companies are also preparing for a possible flood of class-action lawsuits.
In Guangdong Province, along the southern rim of China, investigators are looking into how the substandard batteries made their way to the market and whether they could have entered the export market, appearing identical to Motorola and Nokia goods.
A spokesman for Motorola said that after Guangdong officials announced on Thursday that they had discovered substandard mobile phone batteries produced by Motorola, the company's own scientists immediately conducted their own tests.
Now, Motorola is investigating the matter and trying to determine how to act. Guangdong regulators could not be reached for comment. Sanyo officials also could not be reached late Friday.
Nokia and Motorola, however, say they are very concerned about the substandard goods, particularly because their reputations are at stake in China, which has the world's largest number of mobile phone subscribers at over 400 million.
Kevin J. O'Brien in Berlin contributed to this report.
