Japan Market
Japan Market

Japan Market

KDDI to Buy TEPCO's Telecom Unit

Japan’s second-largest telecoms operator KDDI Corp. has agreed to buy Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) fixed-line telecoms unit PoweredCom, Inc. in a stock-swap deal, the Asahi daily reported on Wednesday. The Nihon Keizai business daily reported on 29 July that TEPCO, Asia’s biggest utility, would transfer its entire 84 percent stake in unlisted PoweredCom in exchange for KDDI shares in a deal that would value PoweredCom at around 100 billion yen ($900 million).

Square Enix to Acquire Taito

In the latest move amid industrywide reorganization, Square Enix Co., the maker of the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy video games, announced Monday it will acquire smaller rival Taito Corp. for 67 billion yen. Kyocera Corp., Taito’s parent with a 36 percent stake, said it has already agreed to Square Enix’s bid. Taito, which operates 270 arcades nationwide, is known as the creator of Space Invaders, the arcade video game that became a phenomenon in the early 1980s. Square Enix was born from a merger of the two major role playing game makers two years ago. The combined sales of Taito and Square Enix stood at 158.42 billion yen for the year ended in March.

FreeVerse Partners and Nihon Enterprise Release BREW Mobile Video SDK

Nihon Enterprise Co., Ltd., a mobile applications and content provider, and FreeVerse Partners, a technology incubation and development company, announce the release of their joint development effort; “MobileMovie Showdo”. Showdo provides BREW application developers a powerful toolkit to integrate video and audio into new and existing BREW applications. Showdo is based on TruVideotm, a high performance video CODEC, and includes a rich API that allows game and application developers flexibility in integrating video and audio into BREW applications. Performance of up to 15fps is noted on common ARM9 based handsets breathing new life and adding a new dimension of excitement to mobile games and video applications.

Japan Mobile Market Myths from Past and Present

Japan Mobile Market Myths from Past and PresentThe recent guest article, Mobile Music Best Practices from Japan and Korea, has resulted in some interesting comments on the web. It seems that the long- wrong-held belief about Japan’s mobile success story is still being attributed to the “There are relatively few people in Japan with a home-based Internet connection, making the mobile Internet more attractive” syndrome. However, it’s clear according to the ITU that Japan’s Internet and PC adoption rates have been much the same as, or even better than, the adoption rates in European countries such as France, Germany and the UK since at least 2001. Another comment we saw regarding the Chaku-uta Full song downloads explained in the article said “it seems to me it may be being marketed (and more importantly used) more as a next-generation ring-tone service than as a true music service”.

This is incorrect. Today in Japan, marketing to encourage customers to upgrade and listen to full-track music on their new mobile devices is everywhere; in print, outdoor and on television commercials, we are seeing massive “i-pod-meets-mobile-phone” promotions. Hence the stereo headphones and J-pop artists making regular appearances to help push the product. Sure, people can use full songs as ring-tones as well (that’s a bonus), but that is not how Chaku-uta Full is be marketed or — more importantly — being used. (And you don’t have to take our word for it. Visit KDDI’s Ad Index site and surf around to watch their current selection of TV commercials.)

DoCoMo 3G Adds 1.2 Million in July

The latest subscriber numbers are in and DoCoMo added an impressive 1,196,400 new 3G accounts in the month of July compared to rival KDDI/au, which only gained 312,000 new customers for their CDMA 1X service in the same period. Overall, however, KDDI managed to sign up a total of 230,500 new customers (2G + 3G) to beat DoCoMo’s 229,800 net additions. Meanwhile, Vodafone gained 18,000 more customers than it lost in July, with the stats showing they added 130,100 new 3G customers.

Apple Opens iTunes Japan

Apple Computer Inc. launched its music-downloading service, iTunes Music Store, in Japan on Thursday with 1 million songs, most of which will be available for about 150 yen a pop, the maker of the hit iPod portable player said. Japanese music on Sony labels are not available on iTunes, said Sony Music Entertainment spokeswoman Kiyono Yoshinaga. “We are in talks with Apple, but we have not reached an agreement at this time,” she said, declining to give details.