Japan's NTT DoCoMo, Lawson In Capital Alliance"

TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- NTT DoCoMo said Tuesday it has agreed to buy a 2% stake in Lawson Inc., as part of a tie-up to enable the use of mobile phone electronic money services at Lawson's convenience store chain nationwide.

NTT DoCoMo said it will buy 2.092 million, or 2.0%, of Lawson shares outstanding for about Y9.0 billion, valued at Y4,312 per share, April 14. Lawson said it will sell those shares out of its holdings in its own shares to NTT DoCoMo.

The move is in line with NTT DoCoMo's recent strategy of seeking new ways to make money as its revenues decline. The company is strengthening services based on cell phones equipped with "mobile wallets," which have built-in chips for storing electronic money and function as credit cards.

NTT DoCoMo and Lawson said in a press release that the combination of DoCoMo's 50 million mobile phone subscribers and 8,300 Lawson stores will help provide convenient, value-added services.

In the initial stage of operations, DoCoMo "iD" credit card payment functionality for "mobile wallet" services will be available at about 100 of Lawson's stores by April 30. The service will be expanded to all Lawson stores by March 31, 2007.

In addition, users of DoCoMo phones set up for the "ToruCa" information-capture service will be able to receive Lawson store sales promotion information at all Lawson stores by March 31, 2007.

Separately, NTT DoCoMo said it will cancel 1.89 million, or 3.9%, of its own shares it holds as "treasury stocks" for strategic purposes effective March 31. As a matter of policy, it considers the cancellation of shares to keep its cumulative amount of treasury stocks below 5% of its outstanding shares by the March 31 book closing of each fiscal year.

The amount of treasury stocks the company will hold will account for 2.34 million, or about 5%, of total NTT DoCoMo shares outstanding after the cancellation.

-By Hiroyuki Kachi, Dow Jones Newswires, 813-5255-2929, hiroyuki.kachi@dowjones.com

-Edited by Chris Gallagher and Jay Alabaster

(END) Dow Jones Newswires"

Posted to the site on 28th March 2006