Business news with words announced+country+phone. 3 news.

THE country's biggest listed electronics maker is to sell its loss-making computer business to an overseas investor. The Shenzhen-listed TCL Corp said yesterday it would dispose of its PC operations with the sale of an 82-percent stake in the unit. Shares of TCL stopped trading yesterday to await a further announcement. TCL's computer unit lost 67.8 million yuan (US$8.9 million) last year on sales of 2.14 billion yuan, the Huizhou-based company told the Shenzhen Stock Exchange earlier. The move follows Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC business and Acer's purchase of Gateway. TCL made a profit in the first half of the year, helped by cost cutting. Its net profit was 45.1 million yuan compared with a net loss of 746.4 million yuan a year earlier. After the sale of the PC unit, TCL will focus on the TV and telephone business. The company recently announced a deal to sell the BlackBerry phone in China next year.

MOBILE phone makers will face a "shuffle" of market positions after China announced two weeks ago that it would relax license regulations for handset manufacturing. Put simply speaking it means that a heap of new players, most of them with unknown brands, will appear in the world's biggest cell phone market. China's State Council has abolished some 186 administrative examination and approval items covering mobile communication systems and terminals. The move indicates that the country will formally cancel the mobile phone production license examination and approval system, which started about a decade ago. Chinese companies intending to manufacture phones, had to have at least 200 million yuan (US$26.31 million) in registered capital and get approval from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Then, if they wanted to sell phones in China, manufacturing companies had to have their products quality tested and authorized by the Ministry of Information

The United Kingdom will be the first European country to get Apple Inc.'s iPhone, after the company announced the mobile phone operator O2 would be the exclusive carrier of the mobile device.