DOCOMO LESSONS

📚 BOOK REVIEWS

SHOCK AND AWE

Outside, Japan Few recognise the name. Yet, in just three years, DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile service provider (42 million subscribers out of a total of 72 million), is way ahead of the Western firms in technology, market strength and finances. Along with its proprietary i-mode service for Mobile Internet access which has about 40 million users, DoCoMo has lived up to its name which means 'everywhere' in Japanese.

SHELLY SINGH

HE Western telecom companies spent billions in setting up networks and buying expensive licences. Together, the European operators sank over a $100 billion in third-generation cellular phone network licences. These networks spell up the next generation services are invisible and the much awaited killer apps are again non existent. The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) for Internet access on mobiles, promoted by Western mobile operators, has been a flop.

That's not for NTT DoCoMo, spun off from Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), set up in July/August 2002. DoCoMo had 42 million subscribers out of the total Japanese subscriber base of 72 million. At its peak, its proprietary i-mode service for mobile Internet access grew by 48,000 new users daily. With no major acquisitions that added to its $30-billion revenues, DoCoMo has more than lived up to its name, which means 'everywhere' in Japanese.

DoCoMo's success has become a subject of intense scrutiny, specially by Western operators who have been unable to find answers for their own mobile markets. Accenture strategist John Beck and Mitchell Wade try to lay bare the company's secrets in six chapters - Love, Inequality, Importance, Luck, Fun and Strength. The book is their learning from a series of interviews with DoCoMo's top brass and gives readers the outline of one of the most spectacular success stories of the 1990s. DoCoMo, it must be remembered, had to create a market for itself, and its success was not about re-engineering or cutting management, matters that D-G schools, it was all about creating a successful model out of nothing.

One can also argue that had it not do with a lucky chairman, had a junior engineer at DoCoMo not insisted on shelving WAP for increasing the Internet on mobile, the story could have been different. The company accepted the engineer's argument that users would be most comfortable with the Internet as they see it on their desktops and hence, HTML (compressed HTML) was the way DoCoMo offered the Net. Some deft marketing, centered on the lack of space in Japan - a third of Tokyo's residents have less than 121 sq ft of space at home - and the need to create personal space on a mobile was a great selling point. So was making i-mode ubiquitous. It was everywhere - at stations, bus stops, in cafes and commercial complexes and on campuses.

This made it easy to get even the technology-averse hooked to i-mode. Every time a problem cropped up, the solution almost came out of thin air. This was largely due to the style of the then CEO Koji Ohboshi who insisted on finding out everything himself instead of waiting for his staff to tell him what was happening in the company or on the streets. Ohboshi, now DoCoMo's chairman, often turned to economics and management books for inspiration even though he rarely found solutions there. For instance, competitors were subsidising phones to sell connections (a $30,000 phone sold for $2). What strategy could he adopt to counter this? He turned to content to increase marketshare.

But here DoCoMo was careful not to get into content creation itself. Content may be king, but being king in everything can be an expensive and risky business, believed Ohboshi. What DoCoMo followed was a cinema hall method of selling information. DoCoMo managers created the right technology (the networks and HTML), space and environment and chose the best of content providers. This was not restricted to weather bulletins and stock quotes but included cartoons, ringtones, tablature (no 'create' exciting 'backgrounds'), music downloads, games and

SANS FIREWORKS

a host of location-based services.

As businesses still grapple with the Wireless Web, the DoCoMo success is the envy of competitors. About 40 million people in Japan work, shop and play with wireless, continuously connected to a bank of data, services and communities. But Beck and Wade fail to capture the essence of this success in their book, which, in parts, reads like a prosaic case study. The authors present neither a ringside view of the action nor an insightful account of a company that turned economics on its head to succeed in an economy plagued by 10 years of recession.

Perhaps the authors were overwhelmed by the way the company grew much like other analysts who have tried to fathom the business model and failed to do so. Another reason could be that the duo had to go zeal as the interviews were supervised by the company's international PR agency. The heavily padded book (why would it have a table on world steel production?) is, to that sense, quite a disappointment. That's because the small DoCoMo team has kept its secrets and strategies to itself.

JOHN BECK is director of research at Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change and co-author of The Attention Economy

MITCHELL WADE, a strategist at Rand, is consultant at Accenture

DoCoMo: Japan's Wireless Internet Revolution

By John Beck and Mitchell Wade.

Accenture Business.

Price: $17.50.