"It is true that we are moving in that direction," said a Pioneer spokesman, responding to news reports that the company had agreed with NEC Corp. to buy the computer maker's PDP division later this year.

Pioneer and NEC are scheduled to hold a news conference later Tuesday on the reported agreement, the spokesman said without elaborating.

The Asahi Shimbun said Tuesday that the takeover bid, which amounts to around 40 billion yen (379 million dollars), would make Pioneer a global leader in PDP production.

Pioneer and NEC each have a 10 percent share of PDP production in the world, the newspaper said.

Nearly 80 percent of Japanese production of PDPs, a next-generation display device for television sets, is concentrated in four companies -- Pioneer, NEC, Hitachi Ltd. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd.

As the size of PDP has become bigger, the four companies began a research alliance last year aimed at lowering power consumption, which is a weak point in the PDP technology, the Asahi said.

SPACE.WIRE