Keys for growth in Japan's mature mobile market

The objective of this thesis is to identify key factors that will produce further growth for NTT DoCoMo in Japan's mature mobile market. Since the early 1990s, the mobile phone market in Japan has grown rapidly, and competition for additional market share resulted in technological innovations like NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service to mobile carriers. Until recently, those innovations had leveraged the growth of the mobile phone industry. However, in 2004 the number of mobile phone subscribers exceeded 85 million and penetration rate reached 66.6%. Under such circumstances, the growth of the mobile carriers is gradually slowing. Moreover, there are threats which have the potential to change the current business model: mobile number portability, flat rate, new entrants, and globalization. In this thesis, I develop and organize frameworks that can be used by a company to produce further growth in a mature market by using traditional growth models. Then I analyze the sources for growth in mobile market and how the threats affect current dynamics in the mobile market. Finally I examine how the frameworks can work for NTT DoCoMo, and discuss the keys for growth in Japan's mature mobile market.

Department dc:contributor.department

Management of Technology Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Oto, Hiroyuki

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael A. Cusumano.

• Management of Technology Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33551

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33551