My smart-ass one-liner about the kind of money i-mode
content providers are making ("yen") was -- as loyal friends have
already gently pointed out -- easily my dumbest contribution
to KEITAI-L ever.
Allow me to spin it as Trenchant Commentary that You
Were Too Slow to Get -- even though, yeah, it was
just a dumb joke when I thought it up and sent it off.
Yes, the yen matters if you're interested in Japanese
mobile telephony.
There's already talk about exchange rates like
145 yen to the dollar. In this week's Economist,
just to name one source. This isn't is some far-right
survivalist/goldbug investment newsletter, trying to
drum up a new subscriber base from the Extra
Chromosome Conservative demographic, after
being wildly wrong about Y2K. This is The Economist.
These guys went to school.
And what is the yen but "lire" spelled with kanji?
A back issue of J@pan Inc. identifies being seen
picking up a dropped one yen coin as a source
of mortification to Japanese Gen-Xers (along with
"being the only one in a group whose keitai isn't
ringing.") Pour enough salt in your beer, and these
little aluminum babies float quite nicely.
And it's about to get worse.
Or better, depending on your point of view. If
you're a Japanese celphone components producer
slated to survive the current shakeout, you're probably
cheering. You're down at the local izakaya after
work, with your chip design team, playing "how many
yen coins can we float in our Kirin daijoki." Your
production is either in Japan or in countries with even
worse deflation, and your fab-line technology is still
world-beating.
News that is maybe just as cheery for them: Japan
seems set to have spectrum auctions soon. The gaisha
telecoms executives might be able to sell to their otherwise-
leery boards the point that Japan is one market where
spectrum bidding is still a reasonable investment.
And maybe it is. But these foreign interlopers will be
converting a lot of dollars -- pumping a strong currency into
government coffers, for which there will be giri owed
to the native industries that attracted this badly needed
cash at a crucial time.
I'm too old, I guess -- like the codger who feels the
rainstorm coming in his kneejoints -- but I feel trade friction
over this one already. I was writing memory board
diagnostics back when Intel was being run out of the
DRAM business by NEC, 20 years ago. Back when
Motorola wouldn't sell you 68000 CPU chips unless
you also ponied up for one of their soured batches of
memory chips as well. (For all the good it did them.)
Sounds like it's the Bad Old Days for U.S. chipmakers
again. Why, I even saw this very white-haired guy on
Yahoo FinanceVision the other day, patiently explaining
what "book-to-bill ratio" means -- a very important
tech-investor number back in the days of 250 yen to
the dollar. If he knows something, maybe I do, too.
There are some things Japan still does well, and this
is one of them.
Coins that float is another.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Fri Jun 29 11:20:49 2001