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The company said that the lithium-ion batteries, installed in Dynabook and Dynabook Satellite laptops manufactured between March and May this year, could fail because of problems with both power storage and transmission.

Ohmori reassured Toshiba users that the fault as not the same one that led both Apple and Dell to recall more than four million batteries after verifying that they could overheat, in some cases causing users to get minor burns and in extreme circumstances resulting in laptops bursting into flame.

Spokesman Keisuke Ohmori declined to say how much the recall would cost or whether Sony would be footing the bill. Of the faulty batteries, 100,000 were shipped in the US, 45,000 in Japan and the remaining 195,000 in the rest of the world.