Mitsubishi Electric is the latest Japanese electronics manufacturer to pull out of the mobile phone handset business, citing limited domestic opportunity for future market growth. “Mitsubishi Electric’s mobile handset business has recently suffered shipment decreases and it has become extremely difficult to expect an improvement in this field,” a company statement said. Mitsubishi has a relatively small share of the overall Japanese market, which has annual sales of about 50 million handsets. It expects its mobile phone sales in the current fiscal year to March to amount to 2.1 million handsets, mainly for leading Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo. According to IDC, that would be less than 0.2% of global mobile phone shipments for calendar-year 2007. The company said it was not planning any layoffs, with approximately 600 workers in the mobile phone business expected to be relocated to other operations.

Following the domination of Nokia, which currently has a global market share of 40%, as well as increasing competition from the likes of Samsung and Sony Ericsson, many Japanese manufacturers have withdrawn to the domestic market in recent years. Mitsubishi is not alone in struggling to find reward at home; earlier this year Sanyo Electric decided to sell its mobile handset production unit to rival Kyocera.