Editor’s Note
Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

DoCoMo Comments on Cingular Acquisition

WWJ has …so far…refrained from the comment on the AT&T Wireless dealdizmo, the value of which seems to have crept about a billion a day, up to $35b over the last week, according to media speculation. Mmm. The Japanese press has pronounced that DoCoMo has confirmed that it wasnot bidding (and had no intention of getting involved in) any deal about who, what and when was going to suck up the losses and deal with the huge potential with AT&T Wireless Services. Well, we say, ?Quel surprise!” For us, the whole episode was the non-story of the month as regards DoCoMo, because there was no way Keiji Tachikawa was going to put ANY money on the line to prop up AT&T; after the losses DoCoMo got saddled with when its last foreign mobile lebensraum went south. So now AT&T has been Cingulared, it’s time for DoCoMo to cash in its chips.

KDDI #1 Again for Subs; Where's W-CDMA?

With the latest Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA) figures in for January, the success of DoCoMo’s new 900i series looks like the best hope for the company to overturn four months of KDDI dominance in picking up subscribers. TCA figures for Jan. 31 2004 indicate that KDDI again proved overwhelmingly popular, with the company picking up 500,100 CDMA 2001x subscribers (against a loss of 268,100 CDMAOne subs) against FOMA’s 132,600 increase and Vodafone’s 11,100 W-CDMA subs.

DoCoMo Posts 137.8 billion yen 3Q Net Income

DoCoMo had a decent 3Q, posting net income of 137.8 billion yen ($1.31 billion) for the three months to Dec. 31, while net income for the nine months this fiscal year hit 494.2 billion yen and sales 3.83 trillion yen, the company said today. But the most remarkable trend, as we’ve been pointing out recently, is for the world’s second biggest cellular operator to lose the ever-toughening subscriber race for Japan’s bread-and-butter, but essential PDC subscriber base. Is this really part of the DoCoMo strategy, or are people getting fed up (gasp! shock!) with Ai Kato? But, with an eye to FOMA’s future, the company also raised its somewhat cautious subscriber projection for the 3G service 20% to 2.4 million by March 31 this year.

iSuppli touts $3.5b Mobile Gaming Biz in '07

Read all about it Here guys and geeks- that’s a x100 market expansion thanks to the wonderful world (gaming environment) of wireless phones. iSuppli analyst Jay Strivatsa says that while mobile gaming has not to date been taken seriously, the advent of 3D graphics and 10,000 polygon/sec drawing capabilities of new phones such as Mitsubishi’s D505i and our fave, the Sharp J-SH53– performance that’s already double that of GameBoy Advance — are going to help push the mobile phone gaming market to $3.5 billion in 2007 from $300 million last year. That’s according to the company’s Consumer Electronics Market: A Disruptive Year Ahead in 2004.

PDC Vs. GSM: The 4G Sequel?

Japan’s Communication Research Laboratory (CRL) plus NTT Communications, KDDI, Hitachi and Fujitsu are teaming up with the China Academy of Telecommunications Research, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and some local carriers to formulate and develop an 4G standard and to fight off the ITU’s standardization bid…

Breaking Windows, DoCoMo Axes Mobimagic

If ever there was proof how far DoCoMo has lifted up its skirt and fled the Microsoft camp for Symbian and perhaps a Linux chaser, here’s the pudding; 39 months after Keiji Tachikawa and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer stood on a platform together and promised to “agressively” promote MS’ microbrowser technology and CE OS on DoCoMo Cellies, DoCoMo has finally cut the cord and axed its Mobimagic subsidiary, the company supposed to have us grappling with Windows on our handsets as well as our PCs

DoCoMo Ducks Friday 13 Deadline?

For some strange reason NTT DoCoMo seems reluctant to sink more cash into loss-making AT&T Wireless – the most grumbled about carrier in the North American market – two years after seeing the value of its $8 billion investment in the “struggling” carrier come to zilch. At least DoCoMo has a footprint in the U.S. market, well one anyway, a demonstration room with a FOMA (Freedom tO Move Away from AT&T?) base station.

Vodafone Makes Man-Machine Move.

The former J-Phone lost considerable ground to DoCoMo in particular in man-machine business applications. The idea of being able to pay for stuff from your phone from Japan’s ubiquitous vending machines (24-hour booze, cigarettes and some really exotic stuff too) is old hat here. But, now, here’s a move that could presage a Vodafone move to remote monitoring business. Vodafone K.K. today announced that it would begin selling a remote module (the VRM301R) to industrial and business machine manufacturers.