Japanese mobile number change causes open war
technology.timesonline.co.uk
From Leo Lewis in Tokyo
ELECTRONICS stores across Japan experienced one of their busiest days on record yesterday as an estimated 200,000 mobile users switched operators and, for the first time, kept their old number after the change.
Although mobile number portability (keeping the same phone number when changing operators) and brisk levels of customer “churn” have been features of the UK mobile phone scene for many years, Japan had always resisted freeing its domestic market to cut-throat European-style competition.
But as “portability day” finally dawned amid a blitz of advertising, the country’s three main mobile operators emerged from their government-protected bubble ready for war.
NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank have made it clear how hard they will fight for a share of Japan’s 93 million mobile customers: they will battle on price, on giveaways and on the shade of pink most favoured by high school girls.
By the earliest estimates of electronics shopkeepers, the first round appeared to have been won by KDDI, whose line-up of 12 new handsets is understood to have lured 100,000 people away from other network providers. A slightly smaller number is thought to have defected to NTT DoCoMo, which has employed a squadron of about a dozen celebrities to endorse its brand.
As the market currently stands, Softbank inherited about 15 million users from Vodafone, KDDI has about 25 million and NTT DoCoMo retains clear leadership with 51 million users.
The main loser of yesterday is believed to be Softbank, the operator of what used to be Vodafone’s Japanese unit, and a victim of the British company's legacy of underinvestment in the network. In polls conducted before portability came into effect, Softbank users expressed the strongest wish to change networks, chiefly because the old Vodafone network gets poor reception.
Japan’s grudging adoption of mobile number portability has been repeatedly postponed and hampered by supposedly insuperable technical problems. Some analysts believe that customer inertia and the universally applied 5,100 yen (£25) switching fee will, in the long run, turn the entire portability revolution into a damp squib.
One source of that doubt is that, although changing operators can now be undertaken without losing the old phone number, the user’s mobile e-mail address does change: for Japanese aged between 13 and 35, said one Nomura telecoms analyst, this is more disruptive to their social lives than changing phone numbers.
The earliest and clearest sign that Japan’s mobile sector has been thrown into a price war came from Softbank.
The night before number portability began, the company announced price reductions and free calls to other users on the same network.
The plan is a taste of what is likely to come when, according to the Multimedia Research Institute, the pool of customers constantly switching between operators swells to ten million.
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