Kansai Tele-Message and Hokkaido Telemessage became the latest victims in Japan’s declining paging industry. Kansai Tele-Message filed for liquidation with US$183 million in debts, and Hokkaido had US$6.3 million in debt in excess of assets at the end of 1999, according to a Kyodo News Service report.
Kansai Tele-Message’s filing came five months after the paging company announced it was no longer accepting new subscriptions.
The report said Osaka-based Kansai Tele-Message is transferring its subscriber contracts to NTT Kansai Mobile Communications Network, a company owned by NTT DoCoMo.
Sapporo-based Hokkaido will stop accepting subscriptions on 15 March and will pull out of the business by June. Hokkaido’s subscribers peaked at 126,640 in 1996, but were at only 30,000 at the end of January.
DDI said it will withdraw from the Iridium business by early next year. DDI plans to liquidate Nippon Iridium Corp., in which it has a 60.5-percent stake. Nippon Iridium owns 11.2 percent of Iridium LLC. DDI plans to continue offering services to Nippon Iridium’s 4,300 Japanese subscribers after liquidation.
Qualcomm said it completed its sale of its terrestrial-based wireless CDMA phone business to Kyocera. Under the agreement, Kyocera will purchase a majority of its chipsets from Qualcomm for five years and continue its existing royalty-bearing CDMA license agreement with Qualcomm. Kyocera aims to produce 15 million cellular phones worldwide by March 2001. The business, which employs 2,300 people, was renamed Kyocera Wireless Corp, said Qualcomm.
The number of NTT DoCoMo iMode subscribers reached 4.2 million in February 2000, making iMode the largest Internet service provider (ISP) in the country, including wireline ISPs.
Konami Computer Entertainment Osaka said it will begin a new service later this year to distribute video games featuring sports over cellular phones. The company will first distribute its baseball game software over NTT DoCoMo’s iMode service.
