DoCoMo plans to offer custom mobile phone videos

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Top Japanese mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo Inc plans to offer improved videos and custom services, seeking to boost profits as it faces intense competition in the saturated market.

The new direction came as the company downgraded its forecast for the year to March after suffering slower sales.

In a new management plan, DoCoMo said it will focus on new services and technologies rather than try to win new subscribers in Japan, where virtually everyone already has a mobile telephone.

DoCoMo plans to develop a service that proposes videos suited to users’ tastes, in addition to offering regular entertainment videos.

“Through acceleration of the network speed, evolution of mobile handsets, and flat-fee structure, we shall enable usage of high-volume movie contents without worrying users about payment,” the company said in a statement.

DoCoMo said it will also continue to promote a faster infrastructure to make it a de facto international standard.

The emphasis on videos and a flat-fee structure should increase the amount of time users spend on their mobile phones, it said.

Through the measures, the firm said it aimed to achieve operating profit of at least 900 billion yen for the year to March 2013.

It would mark growth from expected operating profit of 830 billion yen for this year to March 2009.

The company downgraded its sales forecast for this fiscal year to 4.597 trillion yen, from an earlier projection of 4.768 trillion yen.

Net profit forecast was also revised down to 495 billion, down from an earlier estimate of 503 billion yen.

“Competition among network operators in the mobile communications market in Japan has become increasingly fierce due to price competition (and) market entry by new competitors,” DoCoMo said.

Main rivals KDDI Corp and Softbank Corp have launched a variety of promotional plans aiming to woo customers.

For the six months to September, DoCoMo’s net profit reached 346.7 billion yen, up from 246.5 billion yen in the same time last year.

Half-year operating profit was 576.9 billion yen, up from 408.5 billion yen last year, on sales of 2.27 trillion yen, down from 2.33 trillion a year ago.