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NTT DoCoMo - Strong Net Adds, but ARPU at All-time Low
NTT DoCoMo, Japan's market leader, finished Q1 09 with just over 54.6m customers. Although it continued to lose ground to its rivals, its market share slipping 0.4pp quarter-on-quarter to 50.8% - a 1.2pp annual decline - its quarterly performance was the best for almost three years. It added 445.6k customers, the highest figure since Q2 06. Moreover, this was almost twice as high as the 237.2k gain recorded in Q1 08. Annual growth may have been sluggish at 2.3%, but this too was significantly better than the year-earlier figure of 1.5%.
DoCoMo's customer base is dominated by 3G, with 49.04m or 89.8% of its total using W-CDMA handsets at the end of Q1 09. This was up from 82.3% a year earlier. However, W-CDMA growth has dropped off somewhat in recent quarters. The Q1 09 gain of 1.55m may have been higher than the previous three quarterly figures, but it was 0.32m below the Q1 08 boost of 1.87m. On an annual basis, W-CDMA net additions were down from 8.42m to 5.09m, while proportionate growth fell from 23.7% to 11.6%.
The main reason, then, for Q1 09's strong net additions figure was that the PDC customer base saw a smaller loss than in the year-earlier quarter. While it lost 1.63m in Q1 08, in Q1 09 it was down 1.10m. On an annual basis, the decline was 3.88m compared to 7.65m for the prior twelve-month period. However, on a proportionate basis there was only a slight difference in the rate of decline, with a figure of -41.1% at the end of Q1 09 compared to -44.8% a year earlier.
Despite the increased proportion of 3G customers, blended ARPU fell 10.9% year on year to JPY5,390. This was the lowest figure the company has ever recorded since it began reporting blended ARPU five years ago. Moreover, Q1 09 saw the greatest quarterly decline ever recorded, the JPY340 drop being the first over JPY300. This was reflected in the company's revenues, which saw a 5.6% annual drop to JPY4,448bn. Net profit also fell, a 3.9% decline taking the Q1 09 figure to JPY472bn.
Posted to the site on 11th June 2009