Panasonic Corp. will re-enter the European mobile-device market in April with the company's first smartphone and expand the range of handsets to potentially include tablet computers.
The manufacturer is targeting 1.5 million smartphone sales in the year to April 2013, said Laurent Abadie, chief executive officer of Panasonic's European business.
"It's the right time for us to enter that market, knowing that we used to be quite a strong brand," Abadie said Monday. "We may introduce a wider range of smartphones with larger screens later on. The question is whether we call them smartphones or tablets."
Panasonic, which forecasts a record ¥780 billion loss for the year ending March 31, is cutting jobs and closing factories amid mounting competition in TVs. President Fumio Ohtsubo is also shifting output away from Japan to counter the strengthening yen.
Aiming to boost parts
Panasonic Corp. says it will strengthen its business of making electronic parts for smartphones and other growing products, hoping to boost combined sales from them to ¥450 billion in fiscal 2015 from ¥115 billion in fiscal 2010.
Panasonic will promote sales of multilayer resin circuit boards for smartphones and image sensors for smartphones, medical cameras and security cameras, according to its business plan released Monday.