iPhone's influence on Mobile Carriers in Japan

There are three mega mobile carriers in Japan, which are NTTDocomo, Softbank and KDDI known as brand name of Au.

Now, Docomo is the only mobile phone carrier which does not have a service line-up of iPhone.
Docomo was once used to be the most advanced mobile phone company, developing i-Mode, Wallet mobile etc.

But during this 6 months of 2012, as many as 580,000 users moved to other mobile carriers,
KDDI increased its subscriber by 348,000 and Softbank increased 240,000 subscribers.


Net new incremental subscribers of each operator during above period were;
Softbank: 1,886,000 subscribers.
KDDI : 1,370,000 subscribers
Docomo: 670,000 subscribers.

As these figures show, Docomo is struggling to increase subscribers.

At a shareholder meeting of Docomo held on last June, many severe questions were thrown to then CEO, Mr. Yamada , asking if there is any chance for Docomo to sell iPhone device?

Yamada answered clearly that at this moment, Docomo will not sell iPhone device because Apple force mobile carrier to make a commitment to sell half of new mobile device with iPhone, which is apparently difficult for Docomo to make such a commitment.

But if this requirement from APPLE inc was accepted by other two major mobile carriers, it means that iPhone will be sold quite a lot during coming years.

One of Docomo shareholders requested at the shareholder meeting that;

'Docomo's TV commercial is quite difficult to understand and it doesn't appeal to anybody. Please create more attractive TV commercials than the ones of Softbank,'.

Series of Softbank's TV commercials always rated high by many generations, casting a white dog as a head of Shirato family. Softbank successfully inserted their campaign message within the daily communications among Shirato family members.

Then-CEO, Yamada admitted that 'Oh, we can't beat a dog.'.



2008 ver for the first introduction of iPhone