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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (45233)	3/29/2005 12:58:02 PM
From: slacker711	Respond to of 196562

Qualcomm's target for WCDMA in all of Asia is 25 million units in '05. Note that Docomo's target is probably for their fiscal year ending March '06. iht.com To pass KDDI, it aims to sell 20 million high-speed phones TOKYO NTT DoCoMo, the largest Japanese mobile phone company, has set a target of selling more than 20 million high-speed data handsets this year, twice the number of its customers using such services, to help win a dominant market share. . DoCoMo, whose 48 million customers make it the biggest cellphone operator in Japan, trails KDDI in customers for high-speed data services, which enable faster downloads of video and other files. DoCoMo has 10 million users for the service, known as third generation, while KDDI has 17.4 million. . "More than 80 percent of the handsets we sell this year will be 3G, and the total number of 3G subscribers will be more than our competitor for sure," Takeshi Natsuno, DoCoMo's managing director of multimedia services, said Monday in an interview in Singapore. . Competition among Japan's cellphone operators is heating up because users will be able to switch carriers without changing their phone numbers starting next year. . DoCoMo and its rivals are also trying to obtain bigger shares of the high-speed data market, because 3G users tend to spend more on such services, investors said. . "It's going to be a very competitive market," said Masaru Ogawa, a fund manager at Aberdeen Asset Management. "When you convert people to 3G, revenue per user will rise, but operators will also have to pay for the subsidy to upgrade mobile phones." . DoCoMo expects to sell 25 million mobile phones this year, and plans to move the remaining 38 million customers on its older network to one offering high-speed wireless services within four years, Natsuno said. . "The target seems a bit high," said Atsuo Takahashi, an analyst at Mizuho Securities. "But DoCoMo's adding 3G subscribers at a rate of about one million a month, so I think it's likely they will overtake or tie with KDDI in the near future." . DoCoMo and rival operators are also upgrading their networks. KDDI said this month that it had given Motorola a $150 million order to expand its high-speed cellphone network. Still, the immediate competition will be focused on phone calls rather than on surfing the Internet and downloading video on cellular handsets. . "Even with 3G, one of the killer applications on cellular phones is voice. All the operators are getting into severe competition in terms of tariff for voice," Natsuno said. "The financial impact of the voice competition is much larger than the data competition at this point."