Docomo's most recent mobile lineup had a number of handsets targeting females
Japan’s Telecommunications Carriers Association updated its monthly mobile subscriber data this week, with NTT Docomo making the biggest gains among the ‘big three’ mobile carriers. According to a report by Mainichi Shinbun, this marks the first time in 21 months that Docomo (NYSE:DCM), Japan’s leading carrier in terms of subscribers, had the largest net gain. The report attributes part of Docomo’s gain to the launch of the PlayStation Vita which has Docomo as its official 3G provider.
After the iPhone 4S arrived on both Softbank’s (TYO:9984) and KDDI’s au (TYO:9433) networks, the carrier wars were suddenly interesting, with market leader Docomo having to compete with its lineup of Android phones. But Docomo still sits pretty comfortably ahead occupying almost half of the market at 47.5 percent (see charts below) [1].
Docomo maintains that it can continue to do well without an iPhone in its lineup, and that’s good, because despite the rumors it doesn’t look like it have one anytime soon.
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Note that TCA does not have any data for Emobile for December, so in the chart on the left, November’s data is used. Also, when playing the animation on the right, note that the data points are monthly, so daily points are not actual daily totals, but rather a quirk of the graph. ↩