Sharp Corp. overtook NEC Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. as Japan’s biggest mobile phone maker by shipments for the first time, MM Research Institute said in a report dated yesterday. Shipments by Sharp gained 20 percent to 7.6 million units in the year ended March 31, accounting for 16.3 percent of the total 46.3 million shipments, the researcher said.
DoCoMo has just announced that it will join the, tentatively called, “Asia-Pacific Mobile Alliance,” with six other Asian mobile carriers. The group also includes; Far EasTone – Taiwan, Hutchison Essar – India, Hutchison Telecoms – Hong Kong, KT Freetel – Korea, PT Indosat – Indonesia and StarHub Ltd. from Singapore. The alliance boasts a combined customer base of about 100 million mobile subscribers over eight countries and regions.
Hundreds of IC chips hidden in a mobile phone contain a minuscule amount of gold in their plastic package, in the shape of internal bonding wires. This gold can be extracted quite easily (well, compared to the traditional gold mines where thousands of emanciated mine slaves toiled), and is much appreciated by the mobile shop folks as a windfall. The only problem is to collect enough discarded mobile phones.
Faith Inc. have announced they will take the lead position in a joint venture with game publishers Taito and Square Enix. The three companies have founded a new company, Brave Inc., capitalized at 80 mn yen, with 1,600 shares issued and 14 full-time employees. The holding structure shows 60 percent was invested by Faith Inc., 30 percent from Taito and the remaining 10 percent coming from Square Enix.
NTT DoCoMo stock has been trading at all-time lows, however, DoCoMo is increasingly being viewed as a value play and it may be breaking out of its trading funk. Its ordinary shares shot up 3.51% today to close at 177,000 yen on strong volume not seen since a breakout on January 5th this year when it traded at 193,000 yen.
Info-Plant has issued a very interesting report on mobile-phone usage in Japan focusing on ‘Desirable Mobile Functions and Services’. Data was collected via a nationwide survey of mobile phone users from the networks of NTT DoCoMo, KDDI/au, and Vodafone and valid responses were received from 7,905 users. Questions asked what mobile phone functions or services were used regularly and respondents were asked to list the services or functions they would like to see added to mobile phones in the future (log in for details).
