Vodafone K.K. announced today that its Board of Directors passed a resolution to enact a voluntary retirement program. The program includes a special allowance in addition to the normal retirement allowance as well as job placement support. Some 600 employees are eligible for the program. The announcement comes as no surprise in light of the massive losses announced earlier.
NTT DoCoMo Inc. will shift its global strategy in the mobile phone business from capital investment to technological tie-ups, Kyodo news reported late last night.According to the story, NTT president Norio Wada, in what amounted to a veiled attack on former chief Keiji Tachikawa, said DoCoMo planned a smarter overseas investment strategy than his predecessor. “It is possible we will have partners through technological tie-ups or business affiliations,” Wada said in an interview with Kyodo News.
Japan’s leading parking lot operator Park 24 has announced the launch of an experiment designed to test a FeliCa-based cashless payment solution at its Times 24-hour metered parking lots. The experiment, to last through August 15, supports the N504iC and SO504iC. Park 24 currently has 5,225 parking sites with a total of 81,364 parking spaces across Japan.
UTStarcom, Inc, a leading US-based telecom equipment manufacturer, has grown rapidly with a strategy of focusing on China’s market. In the following interview, the Nikkei Weekly interviews Masahiko Yabuki, a board member and general manager of UTStarcom Japan KK, who tells the magazine that he believes W-CDMA has a ropey future in China.
In the burgeoning global WCDMA handset market, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are gaining market share. Hutchison Telecom is reportedly in talks with LG to purchase WCDMA handsets worth 1 billion dollars, or several million units. Last year, Hutchison Telecom procured 3G phones from Motorola and Sony-Ericsson. The carrier, however, experienced a delay in supply of handsets for several months due to fatal defects in software of 3 million units of 3G handsets received from NEC of Japan and Motorola.
Due on the street in Japan this June, we think this could turn out to be a very disruptive technology for digital broadcasters. Japanese firm Solid Alliance, in partnership with Mitsubishi Plastics, Media Ring, and Connect Technologies, has come up with a little pyramidal device [.jpg image] that hooks up to your TV and records video in 3GPP format onto an SD or miniSD card for playback on a cellphone. Two hours’ worth of programming will fit on a 128-megabyte card, and can be played back on any of DoCoMo’s recent FOMA phones or most of the newer Vodafone handsets.
