NTT DoCoMo: Apple iPhone staunches subscriber hemorrhage

13 years ago

“NTT Docomo Inc. (9437), Japan’s largest mobile-phone operator, said the addition of Apple Inc.’s iPhone to its handset lineup in September is helping reduce subscriber losses to competing carriers,” Finbarr Flynn and Takashi Amano report for Bloomberg News.

“Docomo lost about 93,000 subscribers net to KDDI Corp. (9433) and SoftBank Corp. (9984) last month and wants to cut that amount to between 40,000 and 50,000 a month, Chief Financial Officer Kazuto Tsubouchi said during an interview yesterday,” Flynn and Amano report. “During the first nine months of this year, Docomo lost an average of 141,050 subscribers a month to other carriers, the company said.”

“The last major Japanese carrier to start selling the iPhone had resisted adding the handset because Apple’s iTunes store competes directly with Docomo’s dmarket, its online store for music, videos and games. SoftBank was the first of the nation’s operators to offer the iPhone when it began sales in 2008 before KDDI followed in 2011 and Docomo on Sept. 20,” Flynn and Amano report. “Docomo added 37,100 net users in October, while SoftBank gained 229,400 and KDDI added 158,900. Docomo still dominates the Japanese wireless sector with 44.5 percent of the market.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: As for individual users, so it goes for carriers: ‘Tis far, far better to have iPhone than not.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]