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Hitachi, which helped pioneer PC technology in Japan three decades ago, has not developed new Prius-brand PCs for the year-end shopping season and will now stop making them altogether, Hitachi spokesman Keisaku Shibatani says.

"We want to develop new computers for use in the broadcasting industry, which is becoming more digitized," says Shibatani, without giving further details.

The conglomerate, whose products range from nuclear reactors to washing machines, is pulling out of underperforming businesses to pool resources to fight price falls and mounting development costs.

Hitachi will scale back PC production at its factory in Toyokawa, central Japan, to server-based computers for businesses. In recent years, Japanese PC makers like Hitachi and NEC have been dwarfed in the global PC market by Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo.

"Japanese electronics firms fight for domestic market share while missing more lucrative growth overseas," says Yoshihisa Toyosaki, president of Tokyo-based IT consulting firm J-Star Global. "They've realized at long last that they can't afford to keep doing that."