KDDI CEO Questions FOMA Success

date: March 13, 2002

Tadashi Onodera, president of KDDI, questioned the demand for FOMA handsets during a March 11 press conference held to introduce KDDI's new 3G phone services.

During the talk, he clearly outlined what would make his firm's phones different from those designed for the rival FOMA service offered by NTT DoCoMo Inc.

He said, "Is DoCoMo offering any new applications for the FOMA service? Videophones? I heard hardly any videophone terminals are being shipped yet. And anyway, is there really any substantial demand from the market for handsets that will let two phone users hold a conversation with each other while peering into each other's faces in realtime?" Onodera added, "I think, it's questionable."

Onodera went on to declare that KDDI would be the firm that would end up grabbing the largest chunk of the 3G phone market. In order to try to become the global leader in 3G services, KDDI plans to aim for a marketing blitz to attract masses of users very quickly, as many as possible within a year of the service's launch in April 2002. Onodera says that by the end of March 2003 the company will have supplied users with over 7 million 3G phone handsets.

"If we achieve that target," says Onodera, "then more than half of all the people who use our mobile phones will have 3G handsets." Onodera then said he thinks any of KDDI's rivals won't be able to match that feat in the 3G field.

Onodera's claims appear fairly gung-ho. For example, in February 2002, five months after the launch of the FOMA service, DoCoMo could claim only 55,000 users who had signed up for the service. That means that less than 0.2% of DoCoMo's total phone users were holders of FOMA handsets.

The basis for the "7 million" assertion and the reason why Onodera thinks KDDI is going to be so much more successful than DoCoMo is that KDDI plans to launch its 3G service simultaneously in all the major cities nationwide. Also, from April onwards KDDI will make most efforts to sell 3G service to its users.

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