Subject: [NEXTEL-1] J-Phone raided by Japanese Fair Trade Commission

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 14:37:28 -0500

J-Phone raided by Japanese Fair Trade Commission
November 20 15:43:00, 2002

TOKYO—Japanese operator J-Phone’s news that it has signed 1 million picture service users
was overshadowed by a
raid on its headquarters by the country’s Fair Trade Commission. The raid was reported to
be due to J-Phone’s alleged
violation of anti-monopoly laws relating to the “Sha-mail” picture service.

According to informed sources, J-Phone allegedly ordered retailers to keep the selling
prices of Sha-mail handsets fixed
when it sold them wholesale to retailers, infringing anti-monopoly laws. J-Phone admitted
the raid, however, declined to
comment on the issue. A heated battle among the three Japanese cellular operators for
picture service market share is
under way.

J-Phone introduced the Sha-mail service in March 2002 and has achieved the most popularity
for the offering. Rivals NTT
DoCoMo and KDDI Group also offer versions of photo services for their mobile subscribers.
NTT DoCoMo dominates the
market, but J-Phone has made market share gains with the new service, and has nearly
caught up with KDDI in terms of
overall subscriber numbers. Both operators had just more than 13 million subscribers at
end-September, while NTT
DoCoMo had nearly 42.2 million customers.

J-Phone is backed by Vodafone Group. It plans to transition to the Vodafone brand name
next year.
http://www.globalwirelessnews.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?newsId=3642&print=Y

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