NEC has not withdrawn from the mobile area will continue to develop and produce feature phones

Isamu Kawashima, NEC's chief financial officer, said: "We were late in the smartphone market and had been unable to develop attractive products, so we decided to fade out of the smartphone market." ”

NEC was said to have negotiated with Lenovo that it wanted to sell its smartphone business to Lenovo, but the talks broke down earlier this month and failed to reach a deal.

In addition to the already-listed smartphones, NEC will immediately stop developing, producing and selling new smartphones. NEC will continue to provide support for existing smartphone products. NEC currently shares only 5% of the Japanese handset market, lagging behind other Japanese manufacturers such as Fujitsu and Sony.

This shows that NEC has not completely withdrawn from the mobile domain. It will continue to develop and produce functional handsets and Tablet PCs. In its first-quarter earnings report in Wednesday, NEC said the company's handset business lost 9 billion yen (about $91.8 million trillion) in the fiscal quarter from April to June.

Although NEC was Japan's biggest handset maker, it never took a firm foothold in the US market. NEC merged its handset business with Casio and Hitachi in 2010. NEC recently released the Android-based Casio G ' ZOne Commando and NEC Terrain, respectively, to Verizon Wireless and at&t operations.