Troubled Times for a Telco Titan
It wasn’t so long ago that NTT DoCoMo was the envy of wireless carriers around the world. Their i-mode service was supposed to be the model that all other wireless carriers were striving to emulate with their wireless data services. How quickly things change. Now, DoCoMo is struggling. Their 3G service (one of the first major launches) has had trouble convincing anywhere near the expected number of people to sign up, and competitors have been routinely beating them in the marketplace. Meanwhile, at the height of their popularity with the wireless industry, they decided to branch out from Japan and work on ventures in Europe and North America as well with various carrier partners. Those investments aren’t looking so hot these days. They’ve been writing down those investments, and are scaling back their expectations massively. This might be a case where a company decided that just because they’d hit paydirt once, they would do so again and again. However, especially with their FOMA (3G) service, they completely miscalculated what consumers wanted and how much they would pay for it.
