TOKYO-Keiji Tachikawa, president of Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo, on Thursday said the firm might be forced to revise its target customer figure for FOMA.
NTT DoCoMo launched FOMA, its third-generation (3G) mobile services, last October, targeting to have 1.38 million customers by March 2003. However, it has failed to attract users to the advanced mobile services. The number of FOMA subscribers as of 31 July was 127,400.
Tachikawa said it would release the revised targeting figure for FOMA service at its interim financial result announcement scheduled to be held in November.
To help promote the unpopular FOMA services, NTT DoCoMo last month launched a new “dual network service” that lets FOMA users use the second-generation (2G) mobile service as well as FOMA. Subscribers of the new service can switch from the FOMA service to the 2G service when they cannot connect to the comparably weaker FOMA networks.
Tachikawa told a press conference that the limited service coverage of the network, short battery life of the handsets and lack of strong appeal for the handsets were factors behind the slow customer growth. Currently, the FOM service is only available in a handful of Japan’s largest cities.
Analysts also point out that DoCoMo is feeling competitive pressure from rival KDDI’s cdma2000 1x-based “au” service, which has signed up more than 1.6 million subscribers since its launch earlier this year.
