Editor’s Note
Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

Ad:Tech Tokyo Conference 2009

We attended the inaugural Ad:Tech Tokyo conference yesterday at the Prince Park Tokyo hotel to wander the trade floor and take in a few presentations. The “Effective Mobile Marketing Tools & Case Studies” panel was a clearly a must attend, and the room was packed. Moderated by Akihiko Tokuhisa, Director and CTO of the Digital Advertising Consortium, with presentations by Shigeki Tanaka, GM of Corp. Strategy at FeliCa Networks, Alvin Foo VP for APAC at Velti, John Largerling, VP and GM for AdMob Japan and our very own colleague Kei Shimada CEO at Infinita. Some very interesting slides during that session which was closed with very wise observations by Tokuhisa-san, impressive!

Japan Telecom at ITU World 2009

ITU World 2009 runs again this year, Oct. 5 – 9 in Geneva, with 18 Japanese Telecom leaders on-hand to discuss ICTs for economic growth. With its focus on development opportunities, the event brings together corporate social responsibility and displays cases of best practices. As always it looks to be a fantastic high-level gathering and we hope to be there!

SoftBank Mobile Streak Ends in July

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 Releases Q1 Result for 2009

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.

AEON and DoCoMo Open Marketing Co.

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.

Japanese Cellphones & Global Markets

Apollo 11 - 40th anniversary image via Google Japan top page today!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.