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
 

Smart Phone Appli 'Line' is ready to go into SNS market

'Line' is the smart phone application which has been downloaded by 20million users in Japan and 45 million worldwide so far since its launch on June 2011.

This application is developed by NHN Japan, which is originally a Korean company and built its subsidiary in Japan by acquiring many famous internet startup companies in Japan, called Livedoor etc.

Now, Line is designed, developed by a team member in Japan who used to work in an acquired company,

Like Skype, the software originally was developed to provide free phone call and chat functions among the users who installed the software.

So why could they succeed despite of the late entry to the market after the domination by Skype?


According to one of the core development member, Mr. Atsushi Masuda, Chief strategy and marketing officer, reminds one episode which happened right after they started developing the software.

'When we started to develop the software, one of the software developer came and told us that such software that NHN Japan were about to develop would have no market value, because so many software like Skpe, has been out there so many years.

Then I convinced that this is the absolute chance for us, because at a time when so many software companies release various smartphone applications at any time, the software that enables users to make a free phone call is not the focused area of many software companies. And they really did not look into the reasons why general users, such as elderly people or high school students who don't have much IT knowledge, won't use Skype.'


So at a design phase, they focused on how easily the software can be set up by the users who don't know the very basic IT term like IP address etc.

(their basic ID to identify the user is ordinal telephone number, that way everyone can understand its ID without any IT knowledge, while Skype requires some basic knowledge to be set up.)

It took just only one month for the development team from planning phase until they actually released the software. This speed is also unusual for many of the Japanese software companies. Now many articles were issued by various IT media publishers, to explain how the development team worked to make such short-term release possible.

Today, NHN Japan announced the functions that will be released very soon to make line more like a communication platform and that will enable Line to go to SNS market.

Now, not many smart phone applications developed in Japan could become a well-sold global product. So, the success of this software gets the attention as a flagship software which aims at a global market from its starters.