Philip,
I am not surprised at all by this fact. We work with many
foreign and Japanese content businesses, we have gone through
business plans and financials many times, and it's not easy
to make a profitable business selling just content alone.
However, much of i-mode is not people selling cartoons or other
content, a lot of i-mode is for example JR-Tokkai selling
Shinkansen tickets between Tokyo and Osaka around YEN 15,000
(US$ 125) a pop. I can assure you that's profitable for JR-Tokkai,
and for the customers, since JR-Tokkai passes some of the
cost savings on to the customers, and for DoCoMo as well.
If this wasn't profitable, JR-Tokkai would not expand it from
October to all their Shinkansen trains - at the moment the
discount is only for Nozomi trains.
Globally, probably less than 50% of ALL businesses are
profitable in these difficult times...
Making losses is not reserved to i-mode content...
i-mode is probably one of the better areas to be in,
because it's growing and fun...
Gerhard
Philip Sidel wrote:
> Hello,
>
> One more stumper for all of you. In June 2001, one of the execs at DoCoMo
> suggested that only 20% of iMode content businesses were profitable. Does
> anyone have any numbers suggesting that this has changed? Any specifics here?
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Gerhard Fasol, PhD Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
fasol_at_eurotechnology.com http://www.eurotechnology.com/
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Received on Wed Aug 13 09:06:48 2003