Shane Cole
Japan's NTT DoCoMo suffered the worst month of customer attrition in the company's history in September, placing blame in part on constrained supplies of Apple's new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.
Despite finally becoming an Apple carrier partner for the iPhone, more than 66,000 customers left NTT's DoCoMo mobile telecommunications unit in September, the company said Monday in an e-mail reported by Bloomberg. In contrast, competitors SoftBank and KDDI reported subscriber gains of 270,700 and 232,700, respectively, over the same period.
The popularity of Apple's newly-released iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c in Japan has proven to be bittersweet for DoCoMo. While sales were brisk, internal data suggests many of the customers who jumped ship in September were waiting for the new iPhones, and simply moved on to a different carrier after DoCoMo exhausted their launch supply of the devices.
Executives had hoped that stocking Apple's iPhone line would help stem subscriber losses at the carrier, Japan's largest, which counts nearly half of the Japanese population as customers. Studies showed that more than 60 percent of former DoCoMo subscribers left specifically for Cupertino's popular handset.
If DoCoMo wants to put the brakes on its accelerating churn rate, it "must offer more incentives for existing users to remain with the carrier," said Eiji Mori, an analyst with Tokyo-based IT research firm BCN. 31.9 percent of iPhone 5s and 5c units sold in Japan so far have been DoCoMo devices, with 39.5 percent from SoftBank and 28.6 percent from KDDI, according to the firm.
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42 Comments
Nice try Domo. Like blaming the ground for being in the way after you drove your car off a cliff.
This is what happens when you stupidly pass on the iPhone for years! Idiots!
They're lucky to have 66,000 subscribers to lose!
But..but..according to analysts channel stuffing was the reason for the 9m numbers and many of those iPhones sold are sitting in mobile carrier store shelves collecting dust.
That's funny, because it just demonstrates your customers are not with you because of the service you gave them, but rather the device you failed to offer. I think this illustrates you have much bigger issues with your organization than just not having enough iPhone's to meet demand.
If you were bleeding customers before, why do you think all of a sudden people are going to just fly right back to you? Seems like this is a case of blaming someone else for your shortfall. If I were a shareholder, I wouldn't buy this BS excuse. They were banking too much on Apple to cover their ass.