We think that the market heavyweight, NTT DoCoMo, gets a better payback by spreading Java far and wide (at a low marginal cost), while eschewing pricey gadgets and add-ons (or making the consumer pay for same when desired; we note that DoCoMo’s SH251i is selling for 5,000 yen more than J-Phone’s high-end Sharp Sha-mail handset).
Neale contacted DoCoMo IR, who helped clarify where the 9 percent lives in DoCoMo accounts. In the English version of the Consolidated Financial Statements (8 May 2002), under “(2) Consolidated Statements of Income” (page 16), there’s a section titled, “Operating income from other businesses.” This includes the 9 percent (Aha!!), and amounted to 45,272 million yen in FY2002.
This week, we finish up our Killer Interview Series and find out how NTT DoCoMo is handling spam, a serious quality-of-service issue. Why don’t the other carriers have similar spam problems? Maybe they’re just not telling…
PLUS, We finally present you the results from our Survey taken in March.
In the first part of our Killer Interview Series with one of Tokyo’s contrarian telecoms analysts, we find out what happens to data ARPU when price-insensitive, heavy-volume users migrate to new services (like Java). The answer? It’s not a pretty sight, and the same may be in store for 3G. Plus, we cover ARPU stats, compare FOMA data usage to 2G, and reveal what generates the most packet traffic (think “self-generated content”).
Tango Town — a recently launched J-Sky wireless Web site — works as well with Japanese fonts, characters, and data encodings as with English.
Is this a model for multilingual mobile sites on the babble of baby i-modes in the European multilanguage market?
With i-mode set to launch in Europe in Spring 2002, Wireless Watch looks at mobilizing content — and how to manage all that data.
We interview a Tokyo-based content and management solution provider and ask, Can Japanese providers hope to replicate their success stories in Europe?
