(keitai-l) Re: i-Mode Usage in Japan and NTTDoCoMo Statistics

From: Gerhard Fasol <fasol_at_eurotechnology.com>
Date: 06/24/04
Message-ID: <40DA8B03.7000902@eurotechnology.com>
Hi Alexander:

Phantom Fiber Marketing and Communications wrote:
> 1/ NTTDoCoMo advertises > 40m subscribers to i-Mode in Japan
> Is this based on subscription or usage? 

Both. The 40 Million users pay a subscription fee every month to
use imode and a large percentage (80% or more) use i-mode everyday.

 > I am curious whether people are using i-Mode in these numbers.

Yes, they do.

> As I don't know enough about the Japanese
> i-Mode market, I am curious what happens when a consumer purchases the
> phone.  Do they buy the phone at the carrier with i-Mode automatically
> enabled? (subscribed?).  

No- consumer protection is very strong now in Japan, and DoCoMo is
very careful about image. When you buy a DoCoMo phone, you are
specifically asked if you want to subscribe to i-mode or not, and
in some cases the sales guy goes with you through a 2page document
with all kinds of disadvantages of subscribing, and you have to sign
that you are aware of all these things which can go wrong with DoCoMo's
service. So the sales process is the opposite of a sales guy trying to
talk you into buying an i-mode phone.

> If so, then this number isn't an accurate
> reflection of popularity and we must then rely on usage. 

both subscription AND usage are known and documented, for example in
our i-mode report:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/store/imode/

> I think with
> i-Mode in other markets (perhaps Italy), you must go through a separate
> subscription to enable i-Mode.  Can anyone confirm?

In Japan also, you must make a positive decision that you really want
to pay this extra charge, and you have to sign it.

> 
> 2/ Do Japanese consumers use i-Mode for java games or content? 

both + transaction and much more

> If so, how
> successful have consumers been in downloading over the local network and
> playing games that require consistent network access? Does the network
> quality vary between i-Mode deployments in other markets or does NTTDoCoMo
> approve based on a Japanese benchmark for network reliability? I also
> understand i-Mode just deployed in Greece -- June 2004.
> 
> I'd like to know more about the 'real world' usage of i-Mode and the success
> of its content providers -- those that fall strictly under the 'content
> camp' (pure C-cHTML) and those that fall under the 'entertainment camp'
> (java games).

there is a lot more on i-mode, not just content and entertainment, e.g.
banking, transactions etc.
You can find a lot of it in our imode report:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/store/imode/


Hope this helps,

Gerhard Fasol

-- 
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Gerhard Fasol, PhD                         Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
                                        http://www.eurotechnology.com/
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Received on Thu Jun 24 11:04:28 2004