Yesterday I have returned from a wonderful 4-week stay in Tokyo. The business highlight was my fifth Mobile Executive Tour (MET) to Tokyo which I customised for the Ukrainian MNO Kyivstar. The Kyivstar MET Tokyo took place from 12-19 November 2006 and according to our 20 participants was an outstanding success. In my opinion, it was the best MET of the 5 METs which I have organised since 2004.
Japan is the most exciting and most advanced mobile market with over 60% of mobile subscribers now using 3G devices. On our first day we visited NTTDoCoMo, Japan’s biggest operator. Nowadays DoCoMo aims at establishing the keitai as a lifestyle infrastructure and it uses Sony’s FeliCa NFC (Near Field Communication) technology as the foundation for it. The result is the FeliCa Economy which consists of over 45 companies that have created FeliCa-based secure applications for payments, transactions and loyalty systems. With over 20 million FeliCa-enabled phones the FeliCa Economy has already reached the tipping point. After i-mode FeliCa is the next big thing in mobile Japan.
By far the highlight of the Kyivstar MET Tokyo was our meeting with Softbank Mobile and the presentation given by Ted Matsumoto, the one and only mobile professor in Japan’s mobile industry. Ted Matsumoto was formerly the president of Qualcomm Japan and was hired by Softbank’s founder Masayoshi Son to help reach the goal to become number one in mobile Japan within 10 years. At the age of 67, in theory Ted Matsumoto does not have to work anymore but he is just too smart and too experienced to leave mobile Japan to its own destiny. Thus Ted is now Softbank Mobile’s Chief Strategy Officer with a special focus on technology. Listening to Matsumoto-san we now believe that DoCoMo and KDDI will fear the competitive force of the Softbank Group that encompasses 800 companies, among them many Internet content and service market leaders such as Yahoo Japan.
Another highlight was our meeting with Japan’s number 2 MNO KDDI. KDDI now aims at 30% market share and after the introduction of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in Japan on 24 October 2006 they are adding new subscribers faster than the competition. KDDI has migrated over 90% of their subs to 3G and its music services are so successful that DoCoMo now cooperates with Napster to catch up. In fact, DoCoMo offers a mobile music service flat rate as opposed to the pay-per-download of KDDI. What will Softbank do in the music business? Most probably work as closely as possible with Apple. Expect the iPhone hitting Japan courtesy of Softbank in the first half of 2007. By the way, a very intimate knowledge of KDDI has Ted Matsumoto as KDDI heavily relies on Qualcomm. Ted knows how good Softbank has to become to be better than KDDI in terms of network, devices and services.
And, of course, we have watched Mobile TV in Japan. NHK is the public TV company pushing free Mobile TV in Japan and they do this closely tied to the migration from analogue to digital TV. In fact, while 12 segments of the 13 segments per channel are used for HD TV, 1 segment - hence the brand name “1 seg” - is used for the mobile channel. Now the mobile TV content is simulcast which means the same channels can be watched on the keitai that you can enjoy on your big TV screen. In 2008 original programming will start for the mobile channel and by that time 20 million mobile TV tuners are expected to be in the market, a lot more than today’s 1.7 million devices.
I really enjoyed watching the Sumo Basho live in the KDDI Designing Studio in Harajuku. Yes, I am a Sumo fan and I like Mobile Sumo TV. Japan’s reality is our future.
Note: This article is available with pictures and links on the mobiliser blog.
