NTTDoCoMo Has No Plans to Add iPhone, Focusing on Own Services

NTTDoCoMo may lose some sales to KDDI and Softbank by not selling the iPhone, but revenue from content and services makes up for it, Hiroki said. KDDI last fall joined Softbank in marketing the iPhone in Japan. NTTDoCoMo is Japan’s largest carrier with 60 million subscribers, followed by KDDI and Softbank. “We would like to have the iPhone,” Hiroki said. “But we want to be in the same content and distribution business as Apple so if we brought in the iPhone, we might have to change that. We prefer to have our own business."

Indeed, NTTDoCoMo launched its answer to Apple’s Siri voice-activated digital assistant in making Shabette Courier available as a free downloadable app in March, company executives said. Shabette, which is only available in Japanese, is a voice command-based service that provides answers to a range of topics such as map directions and train schedules. As of July 25, Shabette had been downloaded 3 million times and accessed 130 million times, NTTDoCoMo said.

NTTDoCoMo also will apply the voice activation feature to its “dmarket” portal of e-commerce services, which include online video and anime stores, company officials have said. The dmarket video stores provide unlimited access to more than 5,000 video titles for a $6.60 monthly fee and had 2 million subscribers as of July 21, the company said. The anime service has attracted 40,000 subscribers since launch in July, providing access to 500 titles and 8,000 TV episodes for a $5.30 monthly fee.

NTTDoCoMo also will fully deploy its Hanashite Hon'yaku “translator phone” service Nov. 1, rolling out an offering that supports real-time translation between Japanese and 10 other languages, including English and Korean. Trials began last November and the free app was accessed 220,000 times in a two-month period through July 23, the company said. The translation app is available for all Android 2.3 and later smartphones. In addition to its own services, NTTDoCoMo is supplying Japanese content to international wireless carriers, including Baidu in China, VMG in Vietnam and Buongiorno in Italy.

The services also are increasingly riding atop NTTDoCoMo’s LTE, which launched in December and had gained 6 million subscribers as of September with a goal of reaching 10 million by March, the company said. NTTDoCoMo’s LTE had 9,800 base stations and coverage of 32 percent of Japan as of June, with a target of having 21,000 base stations and 70 percent coverage by March, the company said. The LTE service features 75 Mbps/300 Mbps upload/download speeds with plans for reaching 112.5 Mbps uploads by the time it has 98 percent coverage and 50,000 base stations in 2015, the company said. NTTDoCoMo also sold 2.4 million smartphones in Q2, 40 percent of which were LTE-capable, with a goal of having sold 13 million in the fiscal year ending in March, the company said. While NTTDoCoMo also merchandises tablets, sales of them are still “quite small,” given that the carrier sells the iPad, Hiroki said. Samsung’s Galaxy and NEC’s Medias are among the tablets it sells, Hiroki said.

The carrier said it’s also continuing to expand its digital mobile terrestrial broadcasting service that launched in March using the 207.5-222 MHz band freed up by the shutdown of analog transmissions in August 2011. It is deployed over the existing broadcast infrastructure. NTTDoCoMo’s NotTV Internet video streaming service is using the digital mobile network and offers access to three channels so far for a $4 monthly fee, a company spokeswoman said. NotTV, which is being developed by NTTDoCoMo affiliate Multimedia Broadcasting Corp., had 140,000 subscribers as of Aug. 20, the spokeswoman said. The digital service covers 60 percent of Japan with plans to reach 90 percent by March 2015, Hiroki said. Seven smartphones are compatible with the service. NTTDoCoMo owns 51 percent of Multimedia Broadcasting and is spending about $520 million building infrastructure for the new network, the company said.