NTT DoCoMo Inc. is in final talks to buy a 10 percent stake in South Korea’s KTF Co. Ltd. for as much as $500 million as Japan’s top mobile carrier seeks new avenues of growth, industry sources said on Tuesday. The deal between DoCoMo and South Korea’s second-ranked mobile operator could be announced as early as this week, the sources told Reuters.
Thumbplay has secured $7.5 million in second-round funding led by SoftBank Capital technology Fund III and SoftBank Capital New York. Earlier this year, Thumbplay announced the launch of an online mobile entertainment portal – ThumbPlay.com. Thumbplay said the portal works with most major carriers and offers customers a faster, easier way to order applications, ringtones, images, games and other content directly to their cell phones.
Sir John Bond, who becomes Vodafone’s chairman in July, should review its global strategy. The mobile operator is in investors’ bad books, with its shares trading at a steep discount to the sum of its parts. But a change of strategy — if cleverly executed — could replace the discount with a premium. The solution is to sell Vodafone’s Japanese and US businesses. Not that it will be easy to exit them well.
KDDI/au has announced the roll-out of their A1405PT, made by Pantech & Curitel, will begin today in the Hokkaido region and throughout all areas of Japan over the weekend. The phone was jointly developed with KDDI and marks the first entry of a Korean maker’s handset into the Japanese market. Touted, at 98 grams, as the ‘lightest 3G handset’ available in the market, it comes with a limited set of features (only a VGA camera, for example), but it does have an organic EL “Stream Screen” sub-display and has a built-in crime prevention buzzer function, a feature which was also just introduced by DoCoMo (for good reason).
WWJ has been tracking rumours and hints on the entry of Korean terminals for some time now but this is hard fact on the ground. We have seen Sanyo and Casio pushing into the U.S. market along with Sharp and NEC making moves in Europe. It’s clearly becoming a two-way street with the recent launch of Motorola’s M-1000 with DoCoMo, who have also indicated that LG and Nokia models are in the pipeline.
Japan’s Matsushita Electric will end production of current generation mobile phones for overseas markets, cut more than 1,000 related jobs and focus on developing 3G phones, company sources said. The world’s top electronics maker, known for its Panasonic brand, will close a factory in the Philippines and a development facility in the United States as part of its plan to refocus its resources on phones for next-generation networks, they said. Matsushita said it planned to hold a news conference today in Tokyo. Yoshiaki Kushiki, president of Panasonic Mobile Communications, will attend.
The U.S. called on Japan to increase regulatory transparency in the telecommunications and information technology sectors on Wednesday as it delivered its annual set of government reform recommendations. The proposals were presented by Wendy Cutler, U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) for Japan, Korea, and APEC Affairs to Japanese government officials as a bilateral meeting began in Seattle, Wash. They were made under the U.S.-Japan Regulatory Reform and Competition Policy Initiative, which was started in 2001 to promote economic ties between the two countries.
