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World Business Quick Take

■ Talks to begin this week
Japan expects to launch formal talks on free-trade agreements with three Southeast Asian nations this week, Trade Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said yesterday, in a move to catch up with other countries that have such pacts. Japan will host a meeting of leaders from the 10-member ASEAN on Thursday and Friday, the first time for the gathering to be held in a non-ASEAN country. "We expect to be able to launch formal talks on free-trade agreements [FTAs] with Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia at the summit," Nakagawa said in an interview. "Japan, as a nation without resources, is a country built on trade, and in that sense, we are falling behind. Not having concluded free-trade agreements could become a handicap."

■ Electronics
PSX to have fewer features
Sony Corp said yesterday it ran out of time for testing its new PSX product that fuses PlayStation 2 with an analog TV tuner, DVD player and digital photo album -- and must scale back some of the promised features for the machine's debut next weekend. The PSX version to be released Saturday will dub videos at only half the planned speed, and cannot play rewritable DVDs or recordable CDs, Sony said. It also won't process MP3 music files as had been promised by the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant in October. "We had to drop some functions but it's just for now," said Hiroaki Komatsu, a spokesman for Sony Marketing Japan. The PSX, about the size of the PlayStation 2, is set to go on sale in Japan on Saturday for ?79,800 (US$720) for a version with a 160-gigabyte hard drive and ?99,800 (US$900) for a 250-gigabyte model.

■ Environment
Fujitsu to open local base
Japan's Fujitsu Ltd will set up bases in Taiwan and China to support and promote its green procurement policy, a leading Japanese financial daily reported yesterday. According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Fujitsu will set up an ecology management center at its sales subsidiary in Taiwan today staffed with workers from its environmental management, research and development and personal computer-related departments. A similar base will be set up in Hong Kong to provide technical support to eliminating the use of heavy metals and other toxic compounds in its products by the end of March 2005. Since Fujitsu depends on manufacturers in Asia for many of the core components of its computers and telecommunications equipment, it plans to use these bases to study the situation, switch procurement to firms that meet its green standards and provide technical assistance so that companies can use alternate materials, the report said. Fujitsu will also create a base in Shanghai to conduct surveys on regional parts makers, the report said.

■ Mobile Phones
Global sales jump 22%
Global mobile-phone sales jumped 22 percent in the third quarter as consumers upgraded to more advanced handsets and amid surging demand in markets such as India, Russia and China, researcher Gartner Inc said. The industry sold 132.8 million phones in the quarter, up from 108.8 million in the year-earlier period, Gartner said in an e-mailed statement. Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc, the two biggest handset makers, lost market share to No. 3 Samsung Electronics Co and No. 4 Siemens AG.

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