Toshiba has agreed a deal to provide mobile handsets to Vodafone.
A spokesperson for the Tokyo-based company said it has been in the mobile phone business for some 15 years, but almost only in Asia, primarily Japan, where three of the four operators are customers, namely KDDI, Vodafone Japan, and TuKa, though not market leader NTT DoCoMo. It also has some presence in Europe under the AudioVox brand.
As such, it has been producing for a different radio access technology from Europe’s GSM standard, PDC and CDMA, but 3G, which unifies Europe and Japan in the W-CDMA standard, represents a window of opportunity for entry.
The agreement with Vodafone will see Toshiba develop co-branded 3G phones on which the Vodafone logo will be the more prominent, in line with the operator’s desire to ‘own’ the relationship with the subscriber even to the degree that their phone choice is by carrier rather than manufacturer. This has led to problems with European manufacturers, which have their own strong brand to defend and have objected to playing second fiddle to Vodafone, which at one stage even sought to buy phones carrying only its brand.
A spokesperson for Vodafone said this is the second such exclusivity agreement the carrier has signed. There is an ongoing relationship with another Japanese vendor, Sharp, which started with the Vodafone live! service in 2.5G and has so far resulted in three handsets from the manufacturer. At the CeBIT show in Germany, Vodafone and Toshiba are exhibiting the first product resulting from the agreement, the TS921, a midrange 3G phone.
Clearly Vodafone exploits the more pliant position of new entrant handset makers in Europe with these deals because they are prepared to take a back seat in branding in order to ride on the back of the mobile behemoth. Equally, though, the Asian vendors generally bring to the table an expertise in audio/visual applications that was initially lacking at Nokia and Motorola, and these features suit the current stage of development of the consumer mobile market in Europe, where camera phones have been big sellers over the last year.
