Japan to sell early quake alert systems to other countries

Japanese information technology company NEC has planned to sell its advanced early alert systems for earthquakes in different countries, including Latin America.

The company announced in a statement on Wednesday that it has reached an agreement with the Central Weather Bureau in Taiwan for ground testing the technology in September, EFE news reported.

NEC's cutting-edge technology records preliminary tremors and provides alerts, in the event of major earthquakes, to citizens by sending messages to all mobile phones nationwide or projecting warnings and sound alerts on televisions.

The company has been working with the Japan Meteorological Agency who adopted the system in trial mode in 2004 and turned it into its standard alert system three years later, and this is the first step to commercialise the technology outside the country.

The company hopes to receive an order from Taiwan around December and expects to begin offering its system to other earthquake-prone regions in Asia such as Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines and Nepal, and also to Latin American countries such as Peru and Chile.

Each system is valued at an amount ranging from $44 million to $88 million and includes, apart from the software, the installation of high performance seismometres and construction of a telecommunications infrastructure capable of collecting the data generated by the system, as well as operational support from NEC.