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Japan - Market Intelligence Report
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Market Intelligence Reports provide an invaluable mix of vital market data and background information, including telecoms regulation. Japan's telecommunications market is continuing to consolidate as the larger alternative fixed-line, broadband, and wireless operators and service providers seek to usurp the market dominance of NTT and KDDI. Of increasing importance in all market sectors is SOFTBANK Corporation, an Internet company that is making significant inroads into the fixed-line and wireless sectors. NTT retains Japan's largest public local loop network, serving some 43.343 million fixed-line telephone customers as of March 31, 2007. Nevertheless, it has lost approximately nine million fixed-line customers in the last five years and, although part of the downturn can be attributed to the replacement of traditional telephone lines with alternative forms of access (such as broadband connections and mobile phones), a healthy proportion of customers are clearly migrating to other carriers and service providers, among them KDDI (which has launched a carrier pre-selection service under the national MYLINE scheme as well as a direct access service dubbed Metal Plus). January 2006 saw KDDI acquire Japan's largest alternative fixed-line operator, POWEREDCOM (itself an amalgamation of several regional power companies' telecommunications businesses). By June 2007, KDDI served 5.52 million MYLINE subscribers and 3.010 million Metal Plus subscribers (it is unclear whether this includes any of POWEREDCOM's fixed-line customers). ISP SOFTBANK is growing aggressively and has effectively become Japan's third-largest telecommunications operator, having acquired Japan Telecom in late-2004, Cable & Wireless IDC in February 2005, and cellular operator Vodafone KK in April 2006. With 1.257 million directly-connected fixed-line subscribers, 5.134 million ADSL lines, and 16.440 million cellular and 3G subscribers as of June 2007, the company will become a force to be reckoned with once it rolls out a WiMAX-based platform to offer quadruple play services in the near future. Consolidation should also reduce the number of brands and service plans currently vying for customers and give NTT die-hards greater confidence and more of an incentive to change service providers, as has been witnessed in the cellular/3G market. The wireless market - excluding low-capacity personal handyphone system (PHS) offerings - supported 98.056 million subscribers at the end of June 2007. NTT DoCoMo's cellular and 3G offerings accounted for 53.9% of all subscribers at that time (the FOMA-branded 3G service accounted for 38.6%), while KDDI's au cellular and 3G services accounted for 29.27%. SOFTBANK Mobile controlled virtually all of the remaining market with 16.77%, while new entrant eMobile had 0.06% of the subscriber base at that time.
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