Argh, this went way off the mark.
Just for everyone's info, not all mobile phones in Japan
are cheap. The best ones are quite expensive and completely
unsubsidized.
The weaker conglomerates (JPhone, TuKa and KDDI) offer
subsidized phones. DoCoMo on the other hand does not do this
and they have the biggest market share.
Also the highly subsidized phones are always older models, often
9-months to over a year behind the current technology.
(By selling them cheap they save money by not having to
destroy the older models). If they did not give the phones
away in exchange for getting new customers, the phones
would be scrapped. In this way the "subsidized phones" are not
a way to get customers to pay for the original phone, but instead
a way to make money out of something that should be scrapped
and burned. (Much like the Wal-marts in the US).
As in other countries, the cheap phones are the result
of mass production turned into overproduction.
I am too busy to explain everything else.
Benedict Evans wrote:
> Actually, there are no material handset subsidies in Finland - nor in Italy,
> which has 80% penetration (if you include all the pre-pay stuff). Nor in
> Belgium, but no-one cares about Belgium ;)
>
> >In markets which are approaching saturation, operators are more and more
> >moving away from subsidising handsets, at the very least the level of
> >subsidies are being reduced.
>
> Hmmh. Can't quite agree with that.
>
> On mid 2000, about 85% of households in Finland had a
> cellular phone. At the same time there were about 4.6 million
> cellular subsriptions. Finland having a bit over 5 million
> citisens I'd say we are quite saturated market.
>
> Still, the operators continue to heavily subside the handset
> sales. Money from the subsiding operators and selling additional
> accessories is pretty much the only way to companies selling
> cellular to phones stay alive.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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>
> [ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
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Paul Bryan Lester
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Layer-8 Technologies Inc
QA ENGINEER/Programmer etc etc
EMAIL: paul_lester@lincmedia.co.jp
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[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Mon Jul 30 10:15:06 2001