Disney Gives Up On Cellphones But Bets On Keitai

[Mulboyne]

[floatl][/floatl]Reuters: Disney to enter Japan cellphone market in spring
Walt Disney Co, the No.2 U.S. entertainment company, said on Monday it plans to enter the Japanese mobile phone market early next year using local carrier Softbank Corp's network. Disney, which plans to halt its U.S.-based mobile phone service at the end of the year, is betting on the popularity of its Tokyo resort to help it gain share in the world's biggest market of third-generation phones. Disney would use Japan's No. 3 mobile phone carrier Softbank's for its mobile service and sell its phones at Softbank's stores...The tie-up with Disney would secure Softbank stable revenues from leasing unused basebands...Disney would be the first company to launch mobile phones in Japan by renting space from a carrier. In Japan, carmakers and telecom ventures have used carriers' networks, but the basebands have been used to enable car navigation or PC data transmission.

[gkanai]

these mvnos (mobile virtual network operators) have not been successful in the US (MTV Boost, Virgin mobile, Helio (?)) so I wonder if it would be successful here.

[Kuang_Grade]

these mvnos (mobile virtual network operators) have not been successful in the US (MTV Boost, Virgin mobile, Helio (?)) so I wonder if it would be successful here.

While the MVNOs were a big buzzword in the biz magazines a few years back, there is a market (how profitable remains to be seen) for them, if they have 1) a target market that actually exists (wither the ESPN and AMP'd MVNOs) and 2) a clear message about they are about, what they have to offer AND at an attractive price (wither Disney's MVNO...I'm sure their test marketing said that tons of parents would pay $XX a month for Disney's kid tracking GPS and web based parental phone control but in reality, most parents were not going to pay $600+ a year for a whole separate phone plan with those features when they could add a standard phone to an existing family plan for $120 a year and just tell their kids to behave themselves.)

I believe Boost Mobile is doing OK, but it isn't a really MVNO at all...its wholly owned by Nextel/Sprint and seems to be more of marketing effort to expand their base of working class construction crews/Nascar fans to include "multicultural" people while still hawking the same nextel tech, albeit in a different way....Instead of getting your construction crew all on the same page now with push to talk, you can keep your posse in check by asking "where you at?" with push to talk. Actually, Nextel/Sprint's problem is that their a lot of their recent growth in lower margin pre paid arena and their post paid (contract) biz is barely growing at all.

I believe Virgin has been the MVNO poster child, given they have been doing for a fairly long time now and had a clear focus on the young/poor and/or cheap for a while now. They kept their marketing expenses low, had a very low entry point (always having at least one pre paid phone available at $30 or less..sometimes as low as $10 after rebates) and until recently, some of the lowest overall call costs for although T Mobile has started to hone in on the US cheap-ass market as well. But that said, even though Virgin had over a billion in sales last year and over four million customers in the US, they still lost $30 or so million and apparently have yet to earn a profit during its entire 5 year existence.

But the General's question is a valid one. It maybe that Disney is eyeballing the higher Japanese Average Revenue per User as well having a higher confidence level in their skill of exploiting their specific audience in Japan than they do in the US. Also according to other reports I've read, Softbank is doing most of the heavy lifting by providing billing, support and sales and Disney is only providing content, marketing and input on phone design. So it seems more like a elaborate licensing deal rather than a full blown MVNO. And I imagine they have some ideas about how to use this to promote/milk their audience for their amusement park efforts in Japan.