14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia and Matsushita have reached an agreement meant to help handling their faulty battery crisis. Nokia decided not to take the blame for the entire situation and leave Matsushita to support the costs related to the BL-5C battery replacements and the logistics ones too.
Nokia service centers have been taken over by customers looking for further information concerning the faulty batteries and replacements, if the case. This situation has been obvious especially in India, where the Finnish handset producer has also brought a special service to help its customers. People living in this country will have the chance of checking whether their phone's battery is one of the lot which has experienced problems or not, only by sending an SMS text message and waiting for Nokia's answer.
"Nokia and Matsushita have a long business relationship and the two companies are cooperating closely together in this situation", said Masatsugu Kondo, President of Matsushita Battery. Furthermore, "Matsushita Battery has agreed to cover the direct costs associated with the product advisory, including, among other things, logistics costs, call center costs, and replacement battery costs", he added.
"The safety of our customers and the reliability and quality of our products are our top priorities" said Robert Andersson, head of Nokia Customer and Market Operations. "We are pleased with the good cooperation between Nokia and Matsushita. Together we aim to serve consumers in the best possible manner and minimize the inconvenience this issue could cause them", Robert Andersson further declared.
Not all BL-5C batteries have experienced problems. Actually, the entire crisis has been triggered by no more than 100 such products which have overheated, leaving open the possibility of exploding. All these had been manufactured by Matsushita between December 2005 and November 2006, making it an isolated problem. The huge number of 46 million batteries that had been produced in that period means a lot of such products have to be replaced by Nokia, an extraordinary effort, not to mention the image and credit loss that the company has also experienced.