Telecommunications

July 2004

The number of subscriptions to cellular phone services, including those for car phones, surged 7.7% to 81.51 million in 2003, a drop of 1.8 percentage points from the level of growth posted a year earlier. Though there were no changes in the rankings of the top four cellular phone carriers, second-ranked KDDI Corp saw the share of its "au" brand service climb 2.2 percentage points to 20.8%, while the other three firms suffered a decline in market share. NTT DoCoMo Inc, which had 45.92 million subscriptions at the end of 2002, saw its share of the market drop 1.7 points to 56.3%. This was mainly due to the slow pace of growth for its FOMA third-generation cell phone service and because the company also lagged behind KDDI in introducing new services and revising telecommunications charges. Second-ranked KDDI had 16.95 million subscriptions thanks to the popularity of its Chaku-Uta service, which lets users use actual hit songs for their ring tones, offers handsets with a navigation function and uses Infobar terminals featuring an original design. It ranked first several times during the year in terms of net monthly increases in subscriptions. The market share of third-place Vodafone KK (formerly J-Phone Co Ltd) slipped 0.1 point to 18.4% as the firm was slow to develop 3G handsets. The Tu-Ka group, which came in fourth, also saw its share drop 0.5 point to 4.5%. (The Nikkei Business Daily, July 31, 2004)

The telecommunications ministers of Japan, China and Korea will meet in Sapporo on July 26 to sign an agreement to expand cooperation in the information technology sector, officially moving forward with efforts to co-develop standards for the next-generation of cellular phones. The ministers are also expected to confirm plans to jointly research smart-tag-related issues, setting up a bureau-chief-level working group. (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, July 24, 2004)

A survey has found that 52% of Japanese company employees are supplied with mobile phone sets from their companies, and about 70% of them carry two mobile phone sets when they go outside the office. Nikkei Communications conducted a questionnaire from June 14-29, 2004 on the top page of its Web site (http://www.nikkeibp.co.jp/NCC/) to find out how many office workers were provided with mobile phones from their workplace. It received 717 effective responses. A mobile centrex service, by which people can make a phone call to any extension number in their company via mobile phone, will start this summer in Japan. With a mobile centrex service, companies are to make a contract with a mobile phone service provider, and supply individual workers with a mobile phone handset. Nikkei Communications took this opportunity to carry out a questionnaire to find how many workers were provided with company phones and how people use them. It first asked whether they were provided with company mobile phones. Among 717 effective responses, 381 people, or 53.1%, said yes. To the question of how they use company phones, more than two thirds, or 68%, of company phone users said they carried both company-use and private mobile phone handsets. This means that companies generally provide mobile phones with their employees, and quite a large number of employees naturally adapt to having two handsets on them all the time. Meanwhile, 22% of workers said they carried only company phones. And 10% responded that they carried only their private phone, even though their employers supplied them with company phones. In short, more than 30% users prefer to carry only one mobile phone handset. Those who did not have company phone handsets yet said they would use both company and private properly once they received one from their employer. (Nikkei Communications, July 28, 2004)