DoCoMo Has World's Highest Data ARPU
It’s probably not surprising to the casual observer that Japan’s NTT DoCoMo has the highest data ARPU of any carrier in the world, given the amount of play its i-mode service gets as the poster child for mobile data. DoCoMo earns $17.60 per month per user from data, with all but 70 cents of that from i-mode, and says 90 percent of its subscribers are active i-mode users — which is slightly surprising, given that the carrier’s CEO said in July that 80 percent of its customers either don’t use data or use it just for email. It seems like maybe the CEO (or whoever did the interview) might have gotten some numbers confused, as it would mean that 20 percent of DoCoMo’s users are reponsible for 96 percent of its data revenues. Or, as we said before, perhaps it just indicates how little people use mobile data when the supposed industry-leading service gets just 20 percent of its carrier’s customers to use it.
