KDDI 3Q Profit Jumps 140.5%
KDDI reported that its recurring profit shot up 134.5% to 221.2 billion yen and its revenue was 0.8% higher at 2.10 trillion yen, with terrific terminal sales of the company’s WIN (CDMA2000 1x) cservice, causing KDDI to loft its net profit estimates to 117 billion for the full year against a prior projection of 95 billion yen. KDDI has also boosted its full-year revenue forecast to 2.848 trillion yen from the 2.82 trillion yen it was previously expecting.
The CDMA upgrade route, for now at least, is literally paying off in great dividends for the company, which had 19.6 million subscribers as of December, with 11.8 million CDMA2000 1x users, about 270,000 more than the company had predicted. Meanwhile. KDDI still had 4.2 million cdmaOne users and 3.7 million Tu-Ka users, according to Japan’s Telecommunications Carriers Association.
Behind this is, as WWJ watchers will know, are the bucketfuls of subscribers the company has been scooping up over the last quarter, accelerating ahead of DoCoMo and leaving Vodafone K.K., which skipped releaseing a new set of compelling handsets last year, a distant third. Last October, KDDI for the first time ever scooped more than half of Japan’s new net adds, and in December took more than 70%.
In fact, the company achieved 1.92 million adds between April and December 2003, nearly half a million more than DoCoMo. Cancellation rates declined 1.4% last quarter too.
Not surprisingly, KDDI’s fixed-line communications revenues are plunging, and could fall 9%, while its mobile phone operations are expected to see a 12% increase.
Meanwhile the company continues to innovate. On top of announcing it was going to join the FeliCa consortium, last week the company launched its latest map search service that can be operated by voice activation.
— The Editors.