Editorial»
Next wave of possible phone features
JAN 17 - For Masanori Tanaka, the 27 percent surge in sales of cellphones in Japan last year was not all good. For Tanaka faces the challenge of finding new features to sustain that growth in 2004. .”The handsets already have so many functions,” said Tanaka, who is tasked with picking technologies for future phones as chief product planner for Toshiba, Japan’s sixth-biggest handset maker.
Japan’s most recent cellphone fad, a built-in camera that lets users take pictures and send them to other handsets or computers, proved so popular that about 50 million of Japan’s 80 million cellphone users now own a camera-equipped model. That translated into sales of about $37 billion last year for makers such as NEC, Japan’s biggest cellphone seller, and its closest competitor, Matsushita Electric Industrial.
The next generation of phones may have functions with little relation to telephony. Japan’s leading cellphone service operators, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Vodafone K.K., are pushing makers to find new ways to fuse high-speed Internet services and other features for the $74 billion service market. “Handset makers that can find novel uses for mobile phones, such as letting people use them for train tickets, will be winners,” said Masayuki Ito at Ikegin Investment Management.
For example, DoCoMo, the world’s second-biggest mobile phone operator, and Sony, Japan’s fifth-biggest cellphone seller, have teamed to add a smart-card computer chip called FeliCa to phones. Developed by Sony, the feature will be tested by DoCoMo this year in phones made by Sony and NEC. The chip allows handsets to become payment cards. Instead of swiping a card, users can place their phones on a cashier’s sensors to pay bills. Payment is automatically deducted from stored value on the chip. Extra security comes from having users key in a personal identification number before payment is confirmed. All Nippon Airways and Sega will be among 27 service providers supplied with FeliCa-equipped mobile phones this year. The phones probably will cost users slightly more than the current high-end camera phones, which sell for about $319, said Keiichi Yoneshima, an analyst at Lehman Brothers Japan. Sales of phones in Japan are largely controlled by service operators, who buy them from makers for an average of about $470 and sell them to retailers for anything between 0.01 cents and $360. Operators absorb the difference as promotion costs. Posted on: 2004-01-18 02:56
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