Slow sales amid strong competition to blame

Hitachi is exiting the consumer PC market following disappointing sales, a company spokesman confirmed today.

Keisaku Shibatani, spokesman for the Japanese electronics manufacturer, said the firm would stop making Prius-branded PCs and had not developed new models for the Christmas trading period.

"We want to develop new computers for use in the broadcasting industry, which is becoming more digitised," Shibatani told Reuters.

According to figures from MM Research Institute, Hitachi only shipped 580,000 units in the year ending March 2007.

That left it trailing in eighth spot with a 4.5 per cent share of the Japanese PC market, behind firms such as NEC, Fujitsu, Dell and Toshiba.

Those disappointing figures were despite a predicted 12 per cent overall increase in PC sales this year, according to figures from Gartner.

However, analyst In-Stat has already warned that Microsoft's Vista operating system has not driven sales of PCs as expected.

That warning was echoed in results from UK retailer Dixons, which blamed slow Vista PC sales for a £20m hole in its profits.