I don’t suppose anyone will believe me when I say I predicted this a few years ago. Vodafone has given up on the Japanese mobile phone market selling the company to Softbank. In this press release, Vodafone refers to the sale as a “disposal”. Made me laugh when I read that. Press release materials have to sound good otherwise it scares the investors. It did seem somewhat promising a few years ago when Vodafone bought J-phone, but I guess they didn’t have the balls to sweat it out for the long haul and make it work. It’s a common story. Foreign companies coming here thinking they can simply set up shop and turn a profit only to find that the market is harder than expected. It will be interesting to see how Softbank’s presence affects the mobile landscape.
I saw one week ago an article in an European online newspaper describing that the Vodafone top management was under great pressure from their shareholders. The shareholders were pushing management to sell loss making parts of the company. The operations in Japan was mentioned as one of the best examples to get rid of, according to these shareholders. This “disposal” in Japan fits exactly the management’s objective to please the shareholders.
Back when it was J-Phone, the brand had somewhat a “cool” image since it was the pioneer with built-in cameras in most of their handsets, but once the other providers caught up on that, J-Phone/Vodafone did nothing but go down. The branding switch to “Vodafone only” pretty much marks the point in time when it all ended. That’s my point of view anyway.
I never really thought of J-Phone as a cool brand. My image of J-Phone was the carrier that high school girls used. But I agree that they were pioneers in a lot of areas like Sha-mail.
The problem when it became Vodafone was that it started to concentrate on leveraging the global Vodafone network (3G) to compete with Docomo and IMO lost focus on it’s core target demographic which are not the business users but the younger crowd where J-Phone had established itself. Vodafone was too concerned with trying to beat Docomo when it should have been focusing on it’s real competitor which was AU.
I had hoped that when Vodafone entered the market it would push Japan to become more internationalized so that the phones just worked overseas but unfortunately that has not come to pass. At least, not in the way people in other countries experience it.
With Softbank entering the fight, let’s all hope there’s a price war so our keitai phone bills with go down. Do you remember how much ADSL used to cost before YahooBB showed up?
In the Netherlands there is already a price-war going on. There are about a gazillion providers, and they offer free phones, gameconsoles televisions, navigation-systems and computers just to sign up with them. It’s all a bit crazy, but still expensive in the long run if you do not use your keitai much.
I’ll hang on to my pre-paid for now…