Hitachi has announced plans to recall about 16,000 lithium-ion battery packs manufactured by Sony Corp for its laptop computers sold in Japan, the company said Friday.

Although Hitachi has had no report of overheating problems with the Sony-made batteries, it decided to recall computers that operate with lithium-ion batteries to eliminate consumer concern.

Fujitsu Ltd announced on Wednesday its recall of 287,000 laptop computers with Sony batteries, while Toshiba Corp decided to recall about 830,000 of them last month.

Lenovo Group Ltd and International Business Machines Corp (IBM) have also announced their plan to recall 526,000 batteries for ThinkPad laptop computers.

While Dell Inc began a recall of 4.1 million units worldwide last month, Apple Computer Inc also decided to offer free-repair services for 1.8 million laptop computers.

Nine cases of battery overheating have been reported. Two incidents were reported where people were injured with minor burns, and seven cases of minor property damage caused by batteries in Apple laptops have also been filed.

About 7.6 million Sony-made batteries have been put on recall programmes worldwide.