Mobile Japan pulls in a Milanese crowd — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{How to make over 90% of wireless subscribers use Mobile Internet every day?} Mobile Japan pulls in a Milanese crowd

17 Dec 2005 at 13:17 GMT Jaana Heikkilä

The ultimate Italian MobileMonday of the year was organized in restaurant “Le Biciclette” in the center of Milan. The house was packed of interested attendees who were meeting and greeting each other and listening to the discussion of the Japanese mobile market.

After the presentations the networking continued on a cozy dinner among the speakers and the attendees.

Jan Michael Hess from MobileEconomy gave a general overview on the market, presenting the numbers of the three current operators DoCoMo, KDDI and Vodafone.

He introduced the plans of the three new operators that have acquired new licences: Ipmobile, eAccess (the owner of AOL Japan) and Softbank (the owner of Yahoo Japan).

Except of Vodafone, the Japanese mobile operators are migrating incredibly fast their actual customer bases onto the 3G network, and at this rate, within 2006 more than 60% of the Japanese mobile subscribers will use a 3G phone. Hess also presented the FeliCa mobile payment system which all the three carriers have embedded in their new devices, and which is very common in Japan.

Mathias Schmänk from Access talked about their future plans after DoCoMo has taken the control of the firm. Access is the company that engineered the first i-mode browser back in 1998. Now it is a market leader in the browser market for mobile phones and set-top-boxes.

Gianmauro Calafiore from WizCapital discussed the Japanese business model and its success factors: low prices, easy price model, easy interface, win-win relation with content providers that get on average 90 percent of the end user VAS price.

Mobile Internet in Japan is used everyday by more than 90 percent of the mobile subscribers. One of the extremely interesting features of the market is the flat rate scheme that all the three operators have offered to their subscriber for mobile data access in order to increase the VAS usage.

The next event of Italian MobileMondays will take place in February 2006 in Milan, and it will be followed by the MoMo Rome in March.