For the six months to September 30, it posted a net profit of JPY 335.19 billion ($3.16 billion) down from JPY 356.43 billion ($3.36 billion) a year ago. Sales fell 3.3% to JPY 2.452 trillion ($23.13 billion) as the company introduced various subscriber discounts.
Reflecting the increasingly harsh Japanese mobile market, DoCoMo said it expects to post the company’s first decline in sales and operating profit for the year ending next March.
For the full-year, the company maintained its forecast that it expects to post net profit of JPY 758 billion ($7.15 billion) on sales of JPY 4.82 trillion ($45.47 billion). For the year ending March 2004, DoCoMo posted a net profit of JPY 650 billion ($6.13 billion) on sales of JPY 5.048 trillion ($51.02 billion).
The competition in the Japanese mobile communication market is expected to remain fierce going forward, but we are committed to doing our utmost to achieve our full-year operating income target of JPY 830bn as we announced in the beginning of this fiscal year, said Masao Nakamura, DoCoMo’s president and CEO.
Despite this, the Japanese mobile phone giant doubled its first-half dividend to JPY 1,000 ($9.43) a share.
DoCoMo has also recently revealed that it is in talks with Dutch telecoms group Royal KPN NV and the UK’s mmO2 Plc to introduce its i-mode mobile Internet service in the UK.
DoCoMo, which has been trying to gain a foothold in the UK for some time, wants to be able to license its technology to mmO2, the former mobile arm of BT Group Plc, but it needs to first renegotiate an exclusive licensing contract with KPN, which competes with mmO2 in Germany.
