Hi,
> (Scandinavia, rest of Europe, US) to Japan and how easy it is
> to negotiate revenue sharing/official partner deals with
> NTTdocomo/J-phone/KDDI.
I heard that especially J-Phone/Vodafone are interested to get
international content partners on board, in English or other languages.
> In this context, what are the
> revenue shares given to content providers by J-phone and KDDI?.
The operators take between 9-12% of the subscription revenue.
> Or are European or US players really just a niche market in Japan
> because they are slow in exporting cool applications to Japan.
Yes, European or US players ARE still a niche market in Japan. Most of
their content would be in English, but most of the people in Japan speak
and prefer Japanese. I would also argue that it is rather difficult to
launch a mobile site in Japan (in whatever language) AND make it an
official site, if you are not locally present or have a strong local
partner. Plus, the requirements for becoming official especially on
i-mode are very strict and demanding. To be accepted requires intimate
knowledge of the Japanese market, as well as extended technical and
customer support.
> 2. export wireless applications from Japan to Europe
>
> For application developers - again many of you are - the coming
> 12 months in the European mobile economy might be very interesting.
> Waiting for it for a long time and dreaming about what is daily
> practice in Japan, we will finally have significant penetration
> of GPRS/Java/Colour devices. Operators in Europe are looking for
> successful premium applications. So except for fast movers like cybird
and imahima
> I did not see many Japanese application developers pushing into
Europe.
There are more Japanese content/application providers pushing into
Europe besides Cybird and ImaHima. However, some content providers are
hesitating to move into Europe yet and rather prefer Asia Pacific etc.
Europe is simply not yet attractive for them: the infrastructure is not
ready yet (in terms of technology, handsets, other attractive content
offerings, the business environment and the user market), the market
size of mobile Internet users is too small and the profitability chances
are therefore higher in other regions of the world.
Note that E-Plus is also the first operator to offer the revenue sharing
model which content companies are used to have in Japan.
Clearly, a lot of Japanese players use NTT DoCoMo to move into Europe,
whether its the handset makers (NEC, Toshiba, Mitsubishi), the content
providers (Cybird etc.) or the manufacturers (ACCESS for example).
Cheers,
Andrea
--
Andrea Hoffmann
General Manager, EGIS Tokyo
EGIS Consulting Group
http://www.egisgroup.net
E-Mail: info@egis.co.jp
Ph: +81-3-3264-1060
Fx: +81-3-3265-2260
Received on Mon Mar 25 02:28:26 2002