FOMA Falls Further Behind
(10/01/2003, BWCS Staff) The three major mobile companies in Japan managed to add a total of 705,000 new customers in December, a fall of just under 1% on the same period in 2001. Vodafone’s J-Phone and NTT DoCoMo added fewer subscribers than a year ago, while KDDI managed to treble its net additions.
However, KDDI, which did not have a high-speed mobile service one year ago, saw its subscriber growth rate fall in the final month of last year compared to November 2002. In fact, in December KDDI’s share of new mobile customers was down 8% compared to the previous month to 29.9%, while DoCoMo managed to squeeze its share of new customers up by 7.6% to 55.7%. J-Phone’s take of new customers remained more or less unchanged at 22.7%. Seasoned observers of the Japanese mobile market believe that the switch to DoCoMo was related to discounts offered by the mobile behemoth rather than a change in sentiment towards it.
The picture at DoCoMo is a mixed one. Whilst it still dominates the Japanese mobile market with its enormous customer base of 42.9 million subscribers, it added 17% fewer new customers in December 2002 than it managed a year ago. On the other hand, recent price cuts seemed to have helped it double its sales in December (393,000) compared to November.
Of more pressing concern to DoCoMo is its continued failure to lure new customers to its 3G service FOMA. In December 2002 it attracted only 3,000 new FOMA customers, half of its monthly average for the previous year. Its total its 3G customer base is now only 152,000 and it appears unlikely that DoCoMo will reach its own target of 320,000 3G customers by the end of March this year. Once again, KDDI showed its rival a clean pair of heels as it sprinted away with 775,900 new high-speed customers in the final month of 2002.
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