W-CDMA Close to Becoming Japan's Dominant Mobile Tech
After leading the net additions race in Japan in May, Softbank Mobile has pulled even further in front in June, claiming very nearly half of all the net new connections made in the month. Of the 415k new customers, Softbank accounted for 206k, whilst the larger DoCoMo and KDDI registered just 209k between them. The result was a proportionate growth rate of 3.34% for Softbank Mobile in the second quarter, which was well above the overall uplift in the market of 1.32% over the three months. This gave Japan's smallest operator a welcome boost to its market share position of 0.32pp between March and June, taking its total to 16.77%.
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Net Additions by Operator 01 07 - 06 07
The growth rate at KDDI was also above the market average, standing at 1.85% for Q2 2007 after taking into account migrations from the company's Tu-Ka service to its "au" brand; this saw it gain 0.13pp of share over the period. After taking into account the launch of new 3G carrier eMobile which gained 0.06% market share in June, DoCoMo's market share was left 0.51pp down at the end of June compared with the end of March, after top-line customer growth of just 0.43%.
The 0.4m net additions in June saw the national mobile customer total in Japan top 98m and remain on course to pass the 100m milestone in the fourth quarter of 2007. Penetration at the end of Q2 2007 was 1pp up on Q1 2007 at 76.9%. W-CDMA customers continued to represent the fastest growing group in the Japanese market with a 9.1% increase in Q2 2007. Most of these 3G additions were conversions from 2G PDC technology and as a result numbers using PDC continued to decline, registering a 13% drop between March and June. The CDMA customer base - accounted for solely by KDDI's "au" - recorded a 3.1% uplift in the second quarter, but this disguises the fact that there was an 8.3% increase in the number of EV-DO customers in the period, taking the total to 15.75m.
W-CDMA is only six weeks or so away from being Japan's majority technology by customer numbers, accounting for 48.1% of the country's total at the end of June compared to 44.7% at the end of March. Because of its CDMA2000 customer base, 3G penetration in Japan is of course already well past the 50% mark, in fact exceeding 75% early in the second quarter if both 1x and 1x EV-DO customers are included in the total.
Posted to the site on 26th July 2007
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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