Strategy of Japanese Mobile Carrier
Difusion rate of mobile phone in Japan has reached to 85% in 2006, according to the Cabinet office research.
Which cause share competition between NTT Docomo(53M), KDDI(28M) and SoftBank Mobile(Former Vodafone).
Since Docomo has released "imode(internet service platform)" in 1999, Docomo has increased it share of subscribers as well as contents provider to imode platform, which made Docomo the largest mobile contents platform provider, not only as a retailer of cell phone.
On the other side au has been, targeted to teens and tweens, releasing various kind of services costantly such as rich ring tone service, EZ navi walk(geolocation service) and provided various payment structures useful for the various users and become the number two carrier in Japan.
Sofbank, witch has a lagest stock share of Yahoo!Japan, has aquired Vodafone Japan last year and started to integrate yahoo!mobile services in to their mobile phone. Since more than 90% of Japanese internet user has been using Yahoo!Japan on PC, this integration will be really useful and attaractive service to the heavy internet user.
Conpetition has been severe by these three carriers. First round after implementation of Number Portabilily, au has won by increased 2M subscrebers(Docomo increased half million).
Docomo has released few services to catch-up this situation, one is 2 in 1 feature enables to use two phone number and emails on one device, seconed is flat rate music download service and also added an acceleration sensor to the mobile phone witch let them to provide games like WII.
After 6 month, I would like to see what is the differece brought by these services.
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