The Washington Post is reporting that The Carlyle Group suffered a $330 million loss Thursday when a Japanese mobile phone company in which it had a big interest filed for bankruptcy protection, the second time in a little more than a year that Carlyle has taken a hit in the highly volatile telecommunications field.
Tuesday May 19th saw a double-shot of new handset series announcements with flashy press conferences held by both DoCoMo and SoftBank Mobile (KDDI will announce next week). Leading the pack with six new units from Sharp, including the Solar Hybrid and unique Mirumo models, the energetic third place operator introduced 15 new handsets in total. The rest of their new line-up, due to hit the street over the next few months, come from NEC (3), Panasonic (2), Toshiba (1) and Samsung with the final trio including their OMNIA smart phone – targeted at girls! – and a branded Armani device. You can watch the presentation – 90mins run time in English – online video Here.
The World Economic Forum has named Japan-based Mobile Healthcare, and it’s Lifewatcher product, as a 2009 Technology Pioneer [.PDF]. The company, which develops real-time mobile health solutions for preventing and managing diabetes, obesity and other lifestyle-related illnesses became one of the 34 technology visionaries – full list Here – to be honoured at the 2009 World Economic Forum. The honourees, each recognized as being at the forefront of technology and innovation, were selected by the Forum from 320 finalists from around the world through a stringent review process by a 44-strong team of global experts.
According to this post on Bloomberg a few hours ago, DoCoMo is preparing to announce they will take a stake in Tata Teleservices. A company official, who asked not to be identified, is quoted as stating “The board approved the investment today” but declined to provide the size of investment, which the Nikkei Net Interactive site reported at 260 billion yen ($2.7 billion) for a 26 percent stake. If this happens – which seems quite possible – it would represent their largest overseas investment since the AT&T adventure back in 2000. This could be rather interesting 😎 Update: It’s Official
DoCoMo, Renesas, Fujitsu and Sharp announced that they plan to jointly develop the SH-Mobile G4 single-chip LSI device, and a platform incorporating it, to support the HSUPA1/HSDPA2/W-CDMA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE (2G) mobile telephony standards. DoCoMo and Renesas began joint development work in 2004 on the SH-Mobile G series of single-chip LSI devices, which integrate a baseband processor that supports dual-mode communication and an application processor. The SH-Mobile G4 will be the fourth product to emerge from this collaboration.
According to JiJi Press, NEC has announced it will cooperate with Telecom Italia in the field of broadband and wireless communications technologies. By the end of next March, NEC plans to set up a facility in Italy to introduce state-of-the-art communications technologies and conduct connection tests. Through the tie-up, NEC will aim to win contracts to supply communications equipment to Rome-based Telecom Italia, the leading telecommunications service provider in Italy, and carriers in other European nations and Latin American countries which are affiliated with the Italian firm.
