According to a report by the Nikkei, carried on Reuters, Softbank Corp. will spend about 250 billion yen this business year on improving the Japan mobile phone business it has agreed to buy from Vodafone Group Plc. The investment would be more than the 215 billion yen Vodafone Japan spent a year earlier, the newspaper said.
In addition to my comments in yesterday’s WWJ email newsletter, additional details have been provided by a Tokyo-based industry analyst. In a note to investors sent earlier today, CLSA’s Kieran Calder provided a wealth of data on the implications of the impending Vodafone KK takeover. These include SoftBank moving very quickly to integrate Vodafone (a hallmark of Masayoshi Son’s style), aggressive new sales targets and a looming retail price war (WWJ subscribers log-in for details).
SOFTBANK CORP. and Vodafone K.K. today announce they have made decisions regarding current services based on customer feedback, following the announcement that Vodafone K.K. will enter the SoftBank Group, after completion of the ongoing tender offer bid launched by the SoftBank Group. Customer centers and Vodafone shops received a high number of customer inquiries after this announcement.
Vodafone K.K. has announced that it will commence nationwide sales this weekend of the Vodafone 904SH. This 3G handset by Sharp features the industry’s first VGA liquid crystal display, four times the resolution of current QVGA, making it possible to reproduce visuals and render small characters with more vividness and clarity than before. The model will also support new services and features, such as Face Recognition for enhanced privacy protection, Bluetooth and their Motion Control Sensor capable of measuring handset posture in all directions in 3D a popular function for mobile gaming.
Vodafone Group Plc’s Japanese unit named Softbank Corp. President Masayoshi Son as a director. President Bill Morrow, who was sent by Vodafone Group a year ago to rebuild the company, will remain on the board.
NHK and five commercial TV broadcasters held a splashy launch party in Tokyo’s central Shinjuku train station on Saturday afternoon, announcing the official start of terrestrial ‘One-Seg’ broadcast services. The carriers have lined up accordingly: NTT DoCoMo has partnered with Nippon Television and Fuji Television, while KDDI has forged a partnership with TV Asahi.
The new digital tuner-enabled handsets, coming from Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo, should deliver up to three hours of TV viewing time by processing and decoding only the requested channel — as opposed to current analog units which run only about an hour and eat more juice as they decode all incoming broadcast channels. Vodafone’s 905SH from Sharp is rumoured to be available just in time for the World Cup in June.
WWJ has been covering this story since the spring of 2004 when early prototype handsets were first introduced at an NHK open-house event.
