DCMX Posts Strong 1H Growth
DoCoMo made an announcement regarding the performance of their new DCMX m-commerce product [WWJ video here], which launched 28 April 2006. Noting the claim that the number of contracts exceeded 1 million as of 12 November – just over six months – with 30 handset models now on the market, we decided to dig a little a little deeper and see how the intial 1H growth for DCMX compared with DoCoMo’s flag-ship i-mode portal six months after it debuted in February 1999.
18 March 2000
http://japan.internet.com/busnews/20000318/12.html
After debut of the service on 22 February 1999, i-mode exceeded five million contracts on 15 March 2000, it exceeded it in about 13 months. One million contracts were exceeded after half a year, and four million contracts will be exceeded in one year.
When Natsuno-san was asked during a Q&A session [.mp3 here] at the DCMX launch press conference what the company’s projected user target for the service was, he did not hestitate to state they would like to see it grow along the same lines as i-mode did. So far, so good. It should be interesting to see if they can maintain the path towards 5 million users by May 2007. All things considered – with over 70,000 IC chip reader locations already in place and the typical handset replacement cycle – we certainly would not bet against it.
— WWJ Editors