NTT DoCoMo Market Share Drops Under 50%

NTT DoCoMo, Japan's dominant cellular carrier, saw its market share drop below 50 percent for the first time in almost 10 years in March, according to newly released government figures.

The carrier, which has long led the Japanese mobile market, has been suffering from a steady drop in subscribers since about a year ago, when Softbank Mobile began an aggressive price war and started winning customers from both NTT DoCoMo and second-ranked KDDI.

At the end of March NTT DoCoMo had 53.4 million subscribers or 49.7 percent of Japan's total 107.4 million mobile telephone subscriptions, said the Telecommunication Carriers Association.

The drop below 50 percent was amplified during the first quarter when NTT DoCoMo pulled out of the PHS (Personal Handyphone Service) network business that it had run alongside its main cellular network. PHS debuted in the late Nineties and was intended as a cheaper alternative to cellular, but after initially good performance support for the service began to wane as cell phone calls got cheaper.

In the last 12 months NTT DoCoMo has seen its share of the main cellular market (2G and 3G services combined without PHS) drop just over 2 percentage points to 52 percent. KDDI, which uses the "au" brand name for cellular, registered a small rise to 29.5 percent of the market and Softbank climbed almost 2 percentage points to 18 percent.

NTT DoCoMo has recently begun fighting back against price cuts from competitors with the launch of a completely new range of handsets and new pricing plans. In April it began offering free calls between family members and recently introduced a flat-rate PC data service plan based on its 7.2M bps (bits per second) HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) data service.