NTT Docomo CEO Kaoru Kato today updated the company’s plans on LTE 4G base station roll outs and focus on mobile data plans to improve revenue and profit.
NTT Docomo, whose packet revenues increased by ¥23.4 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2014-15, said it wants to promote the usage of the second mobile device, single server tablets, as well as smartphone usage.
The company also wants to expand packet usage through a packet share plan.
NTT Docomo hopes that its new data investments will result into better revenue. The telecom operator is expecting 2.9 percent increase in sales to ¥4.59 trillion and 3.3 percent growth in net profit to ¥480 billion for the full year.
NTT Docomo, which made Capital expenditures (Capex) of ¥148.5 billion in Q1, said its 4G LTE base stations reached 66,200, representing 10,000 increase from the end of fiscal year 2013.
This apart, base stations compatible with download speed of 100 megabit per second or more has reached 10,100 stations which is triple fold the number NTT Docomo saw at the end of fiscal year 2013.
Its Capex plan started reflecting in network quality. Recently, Nike-A BB consulting carried out in issuance survey covering 55,000 people and DOCOMO was number one in all three categories of coverage, voice, quality and also data quality. This apart, NTT Docomo has been ranked number one in LTE download speed as well.
NTT Docomo revenue for Q1
NTT Docomo said its sales dipped 3.4 percent to $10.5 billion (¥1.07 trillion), while net profit fell 13.7 percent to $1.3 billion (¥136 billion).
The Japanese telecom operator said first quarter revenue was impacted by two main issues. Decrease in voice calls by ¥26.8 billion and ¥45.8 billion cost of providing monthly discounts for customers on two-year contracts.
Total number of handsets sold for the first quarter was 5.16 million of which smartphones accounted for 3.06 million after the announcement of the new product in May, the smartphone sales has accelerated. The percentage of smartphones to total handsets sold is approximately 60 percent.
Tablet sales, with the new billing plan and also the release of new models such as iPad, NTT Docomo have seen an increase of tablet sales of approximately 30 percent.
In the first quarter, NTT Docomo had 225.34 million subscriptions, up approximately 1 million compared to the end of March and the percentage availability subscribers increased to 83 percent.
NTT Docomo had more than 24 million subscribers. This represents 10 million in the last 12 months.