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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter J Hudson who wrote (95682)	3/13/2001 8:45:49 PM
From: golfinvestor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

<All equipment providers for NTT DoCoMo's W-CDMA launch this May will have QCOM license. I wonder why they bother?> All two providers, per the article below. KDDI must be licking their chops! Handset manufacturers not ready for DoCoMo 3G launch By Total Telecom staff 13 March 2001 NTT DoCoMo president Keiji Tachikawa has said that only two of the 11 handset manufacturers which have signed contracts with the company will be ready for DoCoMo's 3G launch in May, The Financial Times reported on Tuesday. Tachikawa was reported as saying that contracts had been signed for the launch of 16 handsets but that only 4, produced by Matsushita and NEC, would be ready on time, with the remainder taking up to another two years to develop. The world's leading handset manufacturer, Nokia, and European counterpart Ericsson have both failed to meet the deadline, the paper said, despite having spent years developing the mobile phones in conjunction with DoCoMo. But analysts were unfazed by the news, according to Reuters, and said the launch of 3G services would still go ahead as planned without causing DoCoMo a problem. Fujitsu said it will try to introduce 3G network cards for data by the May launch while Mitsubishi Electric will aim to roll out its handsets in the summer, the news service reported. NEC plans one model while Matsushita will offer three different types of handsets, it added. Michiko Mori, a spokeswoman for DoCoMo, confirmed the delay when questioned by Reuters, but was upbeat about the prospects of further suppliers being ready soon after May. "We have many vendors developing 3G phones," she said. "We'll try to roll out a succession of new models." But DoCoMo expects only 150,000 people to sign up for 3G in the first year, Mori added, suggesting that the company does not see the mass production of 3G handsets happening any time soon. Since its launch in February 1999, DoCoMo has accumulated around 20 million subscribers for its envied i-mode service, the forerunner of the genuine mobile Internet, but analysts told Reuters that similar supply problems at the outset did not affect its ultimate runaway success. Makio Inui, a telecoms analyst at Nikko Salomon Smith Barney, told the newswire, "When i-mode was introduced, there was only one kind of handset available. For the first seven months, i-mode handsets didn't sell well at all." Motoharu Sone, a telecom analyst at Tsubasa Securities, predicted that it will take at least three years for DoCoMo's 3G service to really get off the ground. "If DoCoMo can solicit enough subscribers, they will go ahead and invest in 3G infrastructure," Sone told Reuters. "Otherwise, they won't push hard the service and will leave it as it is." DoCoMo's 3G service will initially only be available in Tokyo and the neighbouring cities of Yokohama and Kawasaki.