Sony has been forced to undertake a massive global recall of 440,000 Vaio laptops because the computers can overheat and have caused a series of burning incidents around the world.

The recall will involve Sony, which is battling to restore consumer confidence in its brands, offering free repairs to the laptops in 48 countries where the Vaio is sold.

But the recall comes amid suggestions that the company knew about the problem for a year and lingered too long before ordering the recall. Reports in Japan suggest that the company knew about the problem when complaints began to surface in August 2007, but did not report it to the relevant Japanese ministry until last month.

Sony told reporters in Tokyo that it had taken time to find the cause of the problems and establish what repairs were required.

“Our response was insufficient in the end,” said a Sony spokesperson, “while we were struggling to deal with the problem, the number of people sustaining burns increased.” Problems with the wiring and a possible fault with the circuit board behind the screens of 19 models of Vaio’s TZ series have caused more than 200 reports of overheating worldwide. A small handful of users suffered minor burns as a result of the intense heat thought to have been caused by fraying wires and short circuits.

Although the financial impact of the recall is expected by the company to be “greater than zero, but not a major impact”, it deals a heavy reputational blow to the iconic Japanese technology firm. The company has been struggling to recover its old dominance of consumer electronics but remains under constant attack from the likes of Samsung and Apple.

Worse, the company told Japanese reporters that the faults appear to have arisen from problems in both the manufacturing process itself and some components – a judgement that again calls into question the once rock-solid reputation of Sony’s vast electronics division.

Sony is still licking its wounds from a giant recall of 10 million lithium ion batteries two years ago – an incident that cost the company $430 million and temporarily derailed the efforts of Sony’s president, Sir Howard Stringer, to restore the company’s group-wide profit margins to five per cent.

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