DoCoMo has $4.5b fund for U.S., Asian investments

DoCoMo has $4.5b fund for U.S., Asian investments

TOKYO (AFP): Japanese mobile phone giant NTT DoCoMo has built up a war chest of 500 billion yen (US$4.5 billion) to invest in American and Asian telecommunication operators, a senior DoCoMo executive suggested to AFP Wednesday.

Kiyoyuki Tsujimura, managing director of DoCoMo's global business, declined to put an exact figure on how much the company had to spend, but conceded 500 billion yen was "very little compared to our capitalization" (about 3.6 trillion yen).

The company, which is 67 percent owned by the former state domestic telephone monopoly Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., has already spent 650 billion yen on overseas investments since December 1999.

These include 20 percent of Britain's Hutchison 3G, 19 percent of Hutchison Telephone in Hong Kong, and 15 percent of Dutch telecoms company KPN Mobile.

Tsujimura confirmed the company was in discussions with several operators in the United States, but declined to name them.

"We are pursuing a variety of entry plans, including equity investment, but we can also pursue just an alliance," he said, adding the company was following what he called a "capital light strategy."

"The US market is attractive for us because of the size of the market, its potential for growth, and the fact than even though mobile communications are behind Europe and Japan, in fixed Internet, they are by far the most advanced in the world."

Tsujimura underlined, however, that nothing had been decided, nor had DoCoMo completed its search for Asian investment opportunities.

"We have not finished in Asia, we only have one agreement with Hutchison and we can expand more. There is a wide range of development in Asia. We have discussions with various operators," he said.

Tsujimura recalled that while Singapore and South Korea have a market penetration rate close to 50 percent for mobile phones, countries such as Thailand and Vietnam are much less developed in terms of cellular penetration and mobile Internet usage.