NTT DoCoMo Inc introduced a series of advertisements this week promoting an older wireless technology, a move that analysts and investors say signifies the failure of the company's high-speed phone service.
The full-page color ads in the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Nihon Keizai newspaper tout features of DoCoMo's i-mode, a four-year-old service that allows users to send e-mails, browse Web sites and buy tickets from their handsets.
The Journal ad promotes the i-mode service itself while the Nihon Keizai ad is for camera phones for DoCoMo's picture-messaging service. The ads may signal that DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile-phone company, is looking for ways to squeeze revenues from its older i-mode technology while it awaits broader acceptance of its year-old high-speed service, dubbed FOMA, analysts and investors said. I-mode operates on DoCoMo's slower networks using second-generation, or 2G, technology.
"DoCoMo has to rely on its 2G network until FOMA is mature enough to take large numbers of subscribers," said Bruce Kirk, a researcher at KBC Securities Japan. "That's unlikely to happen until late 2003."
DoCoMo's Asian Wall Street Journal ad, which came a day after the Tokyo-based company rejected a request from KPN Mobile NV to pour more money into the Dutch company, welcomed the introduction of wireless Web services by KPN's Belgium unit. Company officials said there was no significance to the timing of the advertisements.
"It's a coincidence that our i-mode ad came out" immediately after the company presented new FOMA handsets, and decided not to make additional capital investments in Royal KPN NV's mobile-phone unit, spokeswoman Mariko Hanaoka said.
The colored ad also promoted the fact that services similar to i-mode are now running in six areas of the world thanks to the recent introduction of the services by DoCoMo partners Bouygues Telecommunications of France and BASE of Belgium.
The full-page Nihon Keizai ad from DoCoMo featured six new camera-equipped handset models for the mobile-phone operator's older service, instead of three new FOMA handsets the company demonstrated at its headquarters a day earlier.
The company runs ads in the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times and magazines such as Fortune in a bid to enhance its recognition outside Japan, where it "is still relatively unknown," Hanaoka said.
The unit of Japan's former telecommunications monopoly has tried to use its minority stakes in its US and European partners to promote the use of i-mode, as well as a standard it helped develop for high-speed Internet access that will be started in Europe over the next two years.
European phone companies, including Deutsche Telekom AG, have been slashing investments as they focus on cutting debt after spending about US$100 billion for the new wireless licenses.
By using its partners' names in newspaper ads in countries where they are headquartered, DoCoMo wants to "get more attention, and support our partners in selling i-mode services at the same time," she said.
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