The official Telecom Carriers Assoc. results for July 2009 were posted today with news DoCoMo has finally ended the 27 consecutive month winning streak by SoftBank Mobile in the monthly net addition subscriber wars, WWJ had pondered whether indeed this might happen early this week via Twitter! It’s been a fantastic run for the crew behind Yahoo! in Shiodome, since taking over from Vodafone here nearly 3-years ago, showing a base gain of about 5M customers.
DoCoMo President and CEO Ryuji Yamada presented the company Q1 performance numbers for fiscal year 2009 this afternoon – the .PDF and video are both available in English. Reported year-on-year highlights from the quarter include; operating revenue -7.3%, operating expenses -4.7%, Capital Expend. -6.5%, MOU -1.5% to 135mins and Voice/Data ARPU at 5,440jpy, -7.6%. With new 18 models in Summer 2009 handset lineup – 4.34M units were sold April 1st to June 30th, down 12% compared to Q1 2008 also noted that 43% of subscriber base is now on a flat-rate data plan. The new i-Conceir” service has gained 1.8M subs in the first 6-months with 364 content service offerings while the BeeTV launch on May 1st show 550K subs paying 315jpy per month.
As first announced on March 31, the JV between DoCoMo and leading department store chain AEON group launched on 24 July. The new entity, AEON Marketing, will combine RFID point of sale details from purchasing preferences along with targeted marketing via mobile phones in order to increase efficiencies, leading to higher purchase ratios at stores, as well as improve customer loyalty. The new company was founded on 800 million yen (approx. $8M usd) and is mainly owned by AEON group with 71% of the share, with DoCoMo holding the 29% balance of stock.
Lets take an A-B-C approach on this recent post from NYT. Since Gen Kanai has already provided a strong and balanced review, taking an open-source software approach, we will stick to the hardware aspect for our humble comments herein.
As long-time observers of the Japan market, with a decent grasp on the global stage considering that’s where many in our audience are based, we have a few thoughts about possible handset futures. As we see it, there are basically two niche ends of the spectrum: smartphones and emerging markets, so it’s reasonable to expect some near-term activity with DoCoMo and one or more of their handset partners getting underway in India, for example. A single digit share in either of those growth areas, let alone the main-stream replacement cycle, would easily surpass the home market annual volumes shipped as indicated at about 30M units. Now to the A-B-C heart of our argument. Follow along after the jump.
This saucy story has been making the rounds and we felt obliged to offer a balance observation, so here goes. It come as no surprise that, just like the PC world, adult is a major content category, certainly this is not a recent development. We have had mobile flat-rate data plans since 2006, do you really think it’s taken this long for the demand to spike? Note, DoCoMo just rolled out a new video download platform – BeeTV – this spring and is agressively advertising that despite supposedly being overwhelmed by demand for salaryman snacks. More after the hop.
The good folks over at YAPPA have launched an interesting platform, in conjunction with Dentsu, for browsing and purchasing magazines. The MagaStore, initially targeting the iPhone but eventually available for other mobile platforms, debuts with 30 titles provided by 20 mainstream publishers including Asahi Shimbun, ALBA, Kodansha, Shogakukan, Shinchosha, SONY, Hankyu and Fuso.
DoCoMo has announced they will launch a new mobile banking service on 21 July allowing users to transfer up to approx. $200 per transaction and $2,000 per month to any other DoCoMo customer. The mobile remittance does not require a new bank account and the total fee per transaction is set at $1.65 The funds can be sent to recipients personal bank account or credited to their DoCoMo monthly phone bill. Apparently, this platform will not be made available to corporate subscribers.
Wireless Watch Japan spent an interesting week in Singapore at the annual CommunicAsia conference and trade show recently where we managed to shoot this demo of the latest Samsung Jet offering which made it’s debut there on June 15th. Billed as ‘Smarter than a Smartphone’ the AMOLED display is super crisp at 480dpi and it’s 800MHz processor lends power to the speedy brand name. The companies Touch Whiz UI, with drag and drop widgets, and the newly minted Dolphin browser featuring one finger zoom while enabling tabbed browsing of up to five web pages at one time were all impressive additions. Watch the video and see for yourself — Special thanks to Mr. Shin from Samsung for taking the time!
The dominant Japanese SNS by subscribers has been under the gun since it’s recent results are off and several newcomers are sniping at their heels. The Japan Times was on-hand recently to hear CEO Kenji Kasahara speak, at a workshop organized for the Geeks on a Plane delegation, and filed this report. In essence the company has announced several upcoming initiatives including an open API for 3rd party developers to create and deploy apps and they will lift the invitation only requirement later this year.
We just could not let This Article go un-challenged – hence see our ++ respond inline below.
The most important factor that led to America’s stunning success in information technology was not the free market but government regulation. Federal trustbusters made AT&T lease its lines to others and eventually broke up the giant telephone company.
++ The Japanese government made similar moves with NTT. Perhaps a more valid point passed over is how the respective governments historically manage and allocate the public wireless spectrum. Results clearly show a "Regulated" Japan approach enabled the mobile industry here to significantly trump the progress of a so-called "Free Market" USA (highest bid auctions) model.
Later they forced IBM to separate its hardware and software businesses. These actions opened the door to competition and lower prices. More important, they changed the industry’s structure, replacing monoliths with smaller, specialised companies which have to work with others with complementary skills. The result has been tremendous innovation. …**Counterintuitively, fragmenting these industries helped common standards to emerge, they say.
++ All of the major vendors have smaller spin-off suppliers here doing the piece work.. often the deepest source of innovation is coming from bottom up to the likes of NEC, Fujitsu and Panasonic et all. **Yet standards in Japan – especially for mobile as mentioned below – are somehow less relevant? Continued after the jump>>
