Keitai -Japanese Cellphones

New York Times article: Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global

One may state a widely accepted concept in the IST community: Japanese society is 5 years ahead of the remaining world: Therefore, the requirement level of terminals is far more advanced and complex.

Being a "first mover” means to open the way, so the industry has to be innovative and develop projects before the Standardization Stage. Japanese companies never relay went too far to massively market mobile devices outside Japan maybe because other players moved faster. Anyway, they enjoy a profitable market not being appropriately addressed by outside competitors.

In the same line, unlike other companies you do not see Japanese Telecom Companies moving to foreign markets. But NEC is doing OK, not on consumer products but on networking solutions.

Iphone is really not doing so well in Japan, missing a few items like: one seg, rfid card, Wallet Mobile and other issues. One Seg is particularly useful as it allows people to access broadcast DTTV -Digital Terrestrial Television, directly from the keitai (Japanese mobile phone), not using data channels. One Seg may be acquired separately and connected to Mobile or PC thru USB connection.

Vodafone failed on the Japanese market because they follow a global model. Vodafone considers that the mobile communications market is global one, so they were developing global solutions and achieving strong economies of scale, mostly everywhere. Like many others, they failed to understand the idiosyncrasies of markets and this is the deadly sin of laziness in Japan. SoftBank is doing OK

The big bang of Mobile telecom boosted after the introduction of pre-paid cards. It was a project which began in Portugal in the middle 90´s. The finance department of TMN was worried about the high levels of bad debt that would inevitable arrive from the dramatic increase of sales. Pre-paid technology, associate to mobile ATM technology was then developed. They could hold other companies from using this advantage for one year and they had a tremendous boost over competitors.

Pre-paid cards were on the origin of their success in Brazil and other countries. Nevertheless, pre-paid cards raise many issues about the identification of users and are widely used in criminal environments. In Japan I was always told by people in telecom that this was the reason NTT-Docomo and other Japanese did not adopt this worldwide industry standard.