Submitted by Mike Grenville on Sat, 18 Oct 2003 12:22

Camerphones have become commonplace in Japan but MMS is not about to replace SMS anytime soon as a report claims. Pernille Rudlin reports...

Instat-MDR, the technology research wing of Reed Business Information released a report this month claiming that SMS usage is declining in Japan, due to competition from other messaging formats such as Multi-Message Services (MMS), e-mail, and, eventually, Instant Messaging (IM).

SMS has never been the all conquering success story in Japan that it has been in parts of Europe, so it would be wrong to interpret this report as suggesting that the popularity of text messaging in Europe is about to decline, now that more and more European subscribers have cameraphones. First of all, SMS (which isn’t commonly known as SMS or even “texting” in Japan anyway) has only been available for communications between subscribers to the same operator network in Japan. For example, NTT DoCoMo offers Short Mail, which allows 50 Japanese characters per message, between NTT DoCoMo subscribers only.

No surprises then that Short Mail is not as popular as NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode e-mail service (usually referred to as “Long Mail”), which allows users to send mail from only ¥1 (0.5p) per message to anyone who has an i-mode mobile phone or Internet e-mail address (which includes people receiving internet e-mail on their mobiles who are with other operators). Messages of up to 250 Japanese characters can be sent and up to 2000 Japanese characters received.

There is no evidence that this kind of e-mailing via mobile phones is declining in Japan. It’s still an essential part of the fabric of everyday life, especially for young people who use it to communicate with friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, continually throughout the day, reassuring each other that they are part of the gang, arranging to meet up, killing time on their commuting journeys.

MMS has added rather than substituted for e-mails in this context. One initially mystifying trend that was noted recently in Japan was for ‘digital shoplifting’ whereby cameraphone users were ‘clipping’ from articles in magazines on the shelves of stores by taking photos of pages, instead of buying the magazine. It turns out that this is partly to do with women in particular not wanting to buy a magazine that would not fit into their dainty designer handbags, but also that users wanted to share with their friends the map and address of a restaurant to meet up in or the look of a pair of shoes that they were thinking of buying. By taking a photo of it and sending it, they can keep a memo of the information for themselves and also send it instantly to friends to get their reactions.

The Financial Times has missed this new trend, relying on old data for its recent comment that “the disappointing news for carriers, however, is that the Japanese send only one or two pictures a month, preferring instead to show friends and family the screens on their phones when showing off their pictures.” This was true a year or so ago, when the first cameraphone users were taking pictures of their children, pets or themselves and then treating their phone like a portable photo album.

More recent surveys show the maturing of usage. Infoplant, a Japanese market research company, surveyed 33,340 i-mode users in June of this year and found that 35% of subscribers who had cameraphones (60% of all subscribers) took pictures on one or two days a week, 27% took pictures two or three times a month and 17% took photos on three or four days a week. Over 70% of them sent the photos they took to other people, a significant increase on the 50% who said they did so in the survey Infoplant conducted a year previously. Sending the photos to friends was also the most popular choice compared to the 65% who said they used the photos for wallpaper and the 60% who looked at the photos on their handsets.

The frequency with which they send MMS is not discussed in the survey, but that is indicative of the Japanese approach to the market, which has been to maximise the overall customer experience, offering the most innovative, easy to use, attractive handsets, a huge variety of ever changing content and ways to connect with other people, at transparent and reasonable prices. This environment allows customers to find their own ways of using mobile data services, easily and enjoyably, and ARPU rises accordingly. The European and North American wireless is much more “per transaction” focused both in pricing and in assessing the success or failure of particular services and producing (meaningless?) forecasts…

Pernille Rudlin

www.pernillerudlin.com"