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Tuesday June 26, 6:20 PMDoCoMo offers discounts in battle with SoftbankTOKYO, June 26 (Reuters) - NTT DoCoMo Inc. , Japan's top mobile phone carrier, will offer new discounts of as much as 50 percent, following suit after new entrant Softbank Corp. slashed prices.DoCoMo, which caters to 54 percent of Japan's mobile users, said it would cut basic monthly fees starting in August for callers and their families signing up on two-year billing plans that aim to lock in users. DoCoMo is struggling to keep its customers after Softbank, which bought the local wireless unit of Britain's Vodafone Group Plc , aggressively cut prices in January to win users in Japan's saturated mobile market. "We have gone one step further than our competition can to offer these discounts," President Masao Nakamura told a news conference. DoCoMo, which is majority-owned by former monopoly Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. , has been watched closely to see if it will engage in a price war with its smaller rivals. DoCoMo estimates a total 6.5 million users will sign up to the plan, meaning a 20 billion yen ($162 million) cut in sales. That sum is tallied in DoCoMo's forecast operating profit of 780 billion yen for the business year to next March, Nakamura said. Softbank topped DoCoMo and No.2 KDDI Corp. in adding the biggest number of users in May. ($1=123.46 Yen) |
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