October MNP - Early Results

Japan mobile industry watchers are awaiting the official October stats from the Telecom Carriers Assoc. (TCA) to be posted this week. Considering the figures already announced by both DoCoMo and KDDI at the end of October it would seem that mobile number portability has - as predicted - provided KDDI the most benefit so far. However, after a quick calculation based on the information already available, SoftBank Mobile may well be in the news as a result of what would appear to be rather ‘disappointing’ numbers.

Via From the Inside Looking In

Today, KDDI(au) and NTT DoCoMo announced figures for the subscriber gains/losses for the week since MNP kicked off. Softbank declined to publish figures.

KDDI is claiming a net gain of approx 80,000 users, 101,200 new users joining from other networks and 20,600 who left au to go elsewhere. DoCoMo says they lost 60,000 users net (within expected range), though they point out they had a net gain of 3,000 users between themselves and Softbank. That would mean that Softbank actually lost at least 20,000 users last week. Regardless of Masayoshi Son’s attempt to make the system failure fiasco (as noted Here — Eds) look like a victim of Softbank’s success, it would appear that Softbank is loosing customers. The losses may have been bigger if their systems had not gone down.