eurotechnology.japan.blog

The Mobile Data Association (MDA) announced in a press release on November 25th, 2005 under the headline "Text messaging soars during October" that SMS sent in the UK during October 2005 "have soared ... to a staggering ... 93.5 million SMS/day". Read below to find out that Japan's numbers are at least three times more staggering.

The Figures below show that Japan's figures are about three times higher - implying that SMS in Europe is impressive, but still has a lot of room to grow further taking Japan as a measure:





Data sources: Data for UK are official data published by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) on their www.text.it website, data for Germany are taken from the "Netsize Guide 2005 Edition - The Mobile is Open for Business" (ISBN 2-9523533-0-1), subscriber numbers for Japan are official data communicated by Japan's mobile operators to the telecom industry association, and the number of email data for Japan are official data from Japan's mobile operators. The data have been extrapolated using scientific/mathematical methods to render smooth curves. Solid data are obtained from official data, shaded curves are extrapolations by Eurotechnology Japan KK.

For more statistical and financial information about Japan's telecom industry:
our JCOMM-report
about 3G in Japan: our 3G report
Click here for a complete listing of our mobile market reports from Japan

Japan's mobile internet is a growth market with about 0.5 Million new subscriptions/month - Japan's mobile internet grows by about one Finland per year, and even more in terms of ARPU!

This growth today is shared almost 50%/50% between DoCoMo's i-Mode and KDDI's EZweb.

Vodafone's subscriber numbers on the other hand have been more or less stable around zero growth.

QR codes (QR = "quick response") have a lot more capacity than conventional bar codes:



Marketing i-Pod-nano with QR-code: QR-code takes you directly to the mobile Apple store to buy your i-Pod-nano here and now on the road:



QR-code is the only message:



More about:
- QR-codes

Nikkei reports, that DoCoMo will use a total investment of around YEN 10 Billion (approx US$ 100 million) to acquire 32.24% of Tower Records Japan's shares from Nikko Principal Investments Japan Ltd, and additional shares in a third party allotment taking it's stake to around 40%. Tower Records Japan plans an IPO, and DoCoMo apparently intends to keep a 33.4% controlling stake even after the IPO.

Tower Records Japan was founded by the US-company Tower Records in August 1979 in a pioneering entry by Tower Records into the Japanese market. At that time, almost all foreign companies entering Japan formed a joint venture with a Japanese company or licensed their brand to a Japanese company. Tower Records instead acquired an unrelated Japanese company with the same name ("Tower Records") and built it's business in Japan successfully alone without a Japanese joint venture partner.

In October 2002, Tower Records Japan became independent of the US mother company through a Management Buy-out by Japanese management.

DoCoMo's strategy

Repordedly, DoCoMo aims to implement many synergies including:
- promotion of mobile FeliCa wallet phones for mobile payments
- use of mobile FeliCa wallet phones for customer relationship management (CRM), reward points, and customer data collection for marketing purposes

Napster Japan: Since about 1/2 of official content sales of i-mode is from mobile music, and since Tower Records Japan is about to launch Napster-Japan in a joint venture with Napster, we expect DoCoMo to become involved in online music distribution through Napster Japan.

The bigger picture: Acquisition of a controlling stake in Tower Records is the latest step in a string of investments by DoCoMo, to expand revenue into new areas independent of ever shrinking voice and data traffic related charges. Recent investments include:
- Mutsui-Sumitomo Credit Cards (Japan's No. 2 credit card issuer)
- joint venture with Rakuten for mobile auctions

With more than 100 stores the Tower Records Japan investment will give DoCoMo an excellent experimentation ground to develop many new ways of using FeliCa wallet phones in a real-life retail environment.

More about:
- mobile music
- mobile FeliCa wallet phones
- mobile payments

Read our CEO's interview on BBC World TV about FeliCa wallet phones.

Watch the movie of the interview:
Windows Media Player - Bandwith = Low|Medium|High
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Read our Mobile FeliCa Wallet phone report.

The Communications and Information Network Association of Japan (CIAJ) and the CEATEC trade exhibition invited our CEO to brief Japanese executives on the differences between Europe's and Japan's mobile phone markets, opportunities for Japanese mobile phone companies in Europe and difficulties for Japanese companies to overcome in Europe.

Presentation at CIAJ Headquarters on Friday, September 30, 2005 (in Japanese):

>>>Download as a pdf-file (Japanese language version, 3.0 MByte)<<<
>>>Download as a pdf-file (English language version, 3.0 MByte)<<<

Presentation at CEATEC Trade Exhibition on Thursday, October 6, 2005 (in English with simultaneous Japanese translaction):

>>>Download as a pdf-file (Japanese language version, 3.0 MByte)<<<