TOT Corp. PCL, Thailand’s state-owned telecommunication agency, is in talks with two Japanese firms in its search for a partner for its telecom unit to speed up its move to third-generation, or 3G, services. TOT expected to conclude the talks before launching its initial public offering (IPO) in late October, agency president Teerawit Charuwat told reporters.
At the Mobile Content World Asia Pacific conference in Sydney last week, Graham Gordon, GM Wireless Consumer and Data Services for i-mode alliance partner Telstra, reported “a sensational” 87-percent active user base for its i-mode portal, meaning that users have used the portal more than once in the last 30 days [Should that be ‘at least once’? — Ed.]. Subscription rates to i-mode are more than 500 percent higher than to Telstra’s WAP service and informed observers are predicting that total subscribers will reach 65,000 by the end of May, some 3 months after the hard launch.
Kyocera Corp. will from the end of the month start outsourcing production of mobile phones sold in the US market to Singaporean firm Flextronics International Ltd., the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported, without identifying its sources. Earlier this year, Kyocera moved production of its phone handsets to Mexico from the US in a bid to improve profitability. But with the group handset business still suffering a 14.9 bn yen loss for the year ended 31 March, Kyocera decided to go one step further and move production to an outside company, the financial daily said.
Perhaps it’s news to some WSJ readers that Asian youth “are hooked on their cellphones, yet they hardly ever talk on them,” but the paper is really looking at mobile phones as an advertising platform. Just as i-mode is cited as a role model for every Western mobile data, evidently now Asian ad agencies are sharing their experiences on advertising to mobile devices, and US marketers are eating it up. While Asian marketers have a head start on their counterparts around the globe when it comes to mobile marketing, there’s the perpetual “if it’s Asian, it must be excellent” trap in to which the Western mobile industry falls.
Renesas Technology Corp. and BenQ Corporation today announced that Renesas Technology’s industry-leading SH-Mobile application processor will be incorporated into BenQ’s latest models of 2.5G multimedia GSM mobile phones. With the first launch of Z2 in April, followed by another model in June, both models will be available in Mainland China, Taiwan, Europe and other Asian areas. Mr. Dai Hirasawa, Chairman & CEO of Renesas Technology Taiwan Co., Ltd. said: “We are pleased to provide our SH-Mobile solution to BenQ, one of the world’s leading mobile phone manufacturers. With this successful collaboration and promising business relationship in the future, I believe we will bring mobile phones powered by SH-Mobile to market faster and further increase our share in the mobile phone market.”
Japan’s Toshiba Corp. said on Monday it had sold its 33 percent stake in a mobile phone joint venture in China to a local partner, withdrawing from a highly competitive market with hefty growth potential. Toshiba, Japan’s second-largest electronics conglomerate, set up the venture with Nanjing Putian and another company in Hong Kong in 2000 to make and sell Toshiba handsets in China.
