Vodafone Group Plc said on Friday it was in talks to sell its struggling Japanese business to Internet communications conglomerate Softbank Corp. Sources close to the matter said the two companies were in the final stages of talks, and a deal could be reached as early as this month. Vodafone said the talks may or may not lead to a deal, and a further announcement would be made in due course.
Vodafone has revealed it is in talks about selling its struggling Japanese phone business to internet and telecoms provider Softbank. Its Japanese subsidiary has been losing customers in the face of fierce competition from domestic operators such as NTT DoCoMo and KDDI. “Vodafone confirms it is in discussions regarding a potential sale of a controlling interest in Vodafone Japan to Softbank,” the company said in a statement. “These discussions may or may not lead to a transaction.”
See our Vodafone’s Japan Exit: Thinking the Unthinkable dated Feb. 2005 — Eds.
This afternoon’s press conference at the swank Roppongi Hills Hilton saw Vodafone Japan putting on a brave face during a difficult news day for the global company. With five separate product announcements – links after the jump – and a good presentation from Ota-san, the famous director of their claimed-world-first photo-mail service, it will take us a day or so to sort through everything and file a more detailed story. While the 904SH handset with Sharp’s new VGA screen will get most of the main-scream headlines, some of the other things we saw were much more interesting… for better and worse (WWJ subscribers login for a peek at Vodafone’s concept TV phone that was also on hand without much fanfare).
Vodafone K.K. today announced the launch of content for Vodafone live! CAST, an automatic content delivery service scheduled to begin with the mid-March 2006 roll out of two new compatible 3G handsets, the Vodafone 904T by Toshiba and the Vodafone 804N by NEC. The visual mobile magazine “yubio” will debut as the first available content offering. “AkibaRun!” and “chu*rara” are scheduled to follow later in March. Yubio (based on a play on words using the Japanese word for thumb, which is oya-yubi) is a visual mobile magazine that readers can quickly flick through with their thumbs and targeted at males from 25 to 35 years of age. Yubio aims to be a visually oriented all-round entertainment magazine with set themes for each day of the week. Each issue, delivered daily, will have approximately 15 pages. (More details after the jump.)
Last week’s announcement of Nokia and Sanyo joining forces to boost their combined CDMA market share in the US was lost in the next-gen mobile TV hype and media avalanche (not to mention complaints about pokey dial-up access from the venue) coming from the 3GSM World Congress. The Nokia-Sanyo combination is an obvious play with both sides bringing a decent value proposition to the table; Nokia has massive manufacturing capacity, established distribution channels and a global brand while Sanyo has proven experience producing ultra-cool high-tech handsets and strong operator/vendor relationships. The companies gave no financial details of the tie-up, which is expected to close in the second quarter, but the JV will be based in Osaka and San Diego with an estimated 3,500 employees.
The challenge — and rewards — of morphing these respective ‘best of’ brands into a unified product offering are significant. Sanyo has advanced mobile battery and GPS chip expertise that even a Nokia would be hard-pressed to build on their own and such technologies are fast becoming key competitive differentiators as the US (and other markets) mandate emergency location reporting and other public safety services. Sanyo was vaulted to the ranks of top-tier suppliers to national champion DoCoMo last year as the name behind some of Big D’s first GPS-enabled models, the SA800i and SA700iS.
A Nokia-Sanyo tie-up makes sense from an economy of scale perspective and the end result should be better hardware for the end user, potentially at a lower price, which should please the operators and — more to the point — their shareholders.
Vodafone K.K. announced its findings today from a December 2005 survey conducted among Vodafone K.K. customers on the effectiveness of anti-spam measures. The results indicated that over 90% of customers using the URL link mail blocking function first introduced in March 2005 experienced a decrease in the number of spam mails received. In addition, approximately 80% of customers using the function said spam mails fell to a level of 0 or 1 per day.
