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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Mike Buckley who wrote (17489)2/8/2000 10:10:00 AM
From: Ruffian  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 54805
 
Japan's DDI/Ido:cdmaOne Mobile Phone
Subscribers Top 4M

TOKYO -- Japanese telecommunications carriers DDI Corp. (J.DDD or
9433) and Ido Corp. said Tuesday that the total number of subscribers to
their popular cdmaOne mobile phone service has topped 4 million.

Within this total, DDI's mobile phone operations accounted for about 2.88
million subscribers while the unlisted carrier Ido accounted for the remaining
1.12 million. Ido currently operates the service in the Kansai and Kanto
regions of central Japan, while DDI offers coverage in all other regions.

DDI and Ido, which together with Japan's KDD Corp. (J.KDD or 9431)
plan to merge later this year, launched the high-performance mobile phone
services on a nationwide basis Japan on April 14, 1999.

DDI and Ido said that they hope to boost subscribership to 10 million by the
end of March 2001.

Briefing Book for: J.DDD | J.KDD



To: Mike Buckley who wrote (17489)2/8/2000 12:35:00 PM
From: slacker711  Respond to of 54805
 
Though it was a record quarter with nearly 9 million net new subscribers signed up, I was hoping it would be at least 11 million.

As was I....however I think it helps to look at the CDMA tornado as a bunch of separate national tornadoes. The key to the latest numbers was that Korean sub growth slowed down....the question is if this is a trend or is Korea reaching maturity (as it inevitably will). A couple of points....

1) From what I can tell, the Korean PCS providers stopped offering handset subsidies during the fourth quarter. During the past year Korean growth has basically trended with subsidies....the big quarters (the first and third) were when these providers were undergoing price wars. The second and fourth were MUCH slower. It makes sense....just wait three months and you are likely to get more than 50% off....OTOH Korea has reached 50% penetration and new subs will slow down at some point this year. I'm trying to find out if the subsidies are back in effect for this quarter...but havent found out yet.

2) Japan sub growth has not accelerated. NTT Docomo seems to have successfully fended of the competition of CDMA with their i-mode (as well as some big price cuts). The introduction of 64kbps service will help but their definitely needs to be progress made in the content offered by these phones. Think about it....how much good would T1 access have done you 10 years ago? Almost none...the apps need to be in place.

3) Latin America has exploded. Over the last 4 quarters new subs have been .3m, .4m, 1m, 2m. I dont see any reason for these numbers not to continue to do well. If places like Brazil and Mexico can do what Turkey has done, then we will see growth like this for a couple of years.

4) The US will be the real driver of growth for this year. BAM and VOD are still in the process of transitioning their subscribers to digital...it has been a painfully slow transition. This past quarter might have showed some indication that it is starting to happen more quickly. Hopefully this trend will continue, because the US is THE KEY to CDMA growth (and thus Qualcomm) for 2000.

5) China is the wildcard....I have read the estimates of having 10m subs this year (they definitely stated subs and not capacity). I think that it would be insane for Qualcomm to endorse this estimate. It would be nice if China works out...but I'm still not going to count on that type of growth.

This is all from the perspective of voice users....data still seems to be a year off. I'd love to hear about a laptop manufactuer working with Qualcomm on HDR....this might signal the real take-off of data.

Slacker