Qualcomm Inc (QCOM)

[khemara_qc]

DoCoMo Focuses on China to Develop Future Cell Phone Technology

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000101&sid=a1lEnkAS9Uzo

June 14 (Bloomberg) -- NTT DoCoMo Inc., the world's second- largest cell-phone operator, will invest more than $2.5 million a year to develop high-speed, fourth-generation mobile communication technology in China, a company executive said.

Tokyo-based DoCoMo is already researching a faster technology for the market, even though China has yet to award licenses for third-generation service to cell phone operators. The service allows faster downloads of data and images from the Internet.

``China is the world's largest mobile phone market,'' Masahiro Minomo, head of NTT DoCoMo's research center in Beijing, said in an interview. ``We hope to contribute to China's standardization of 4G and `beyond 3G' technology.''

DoCoMo, which is catching up with smaller rival KDDI Corp. in Japan's high-speed mobile phone subscriber market, plans to use the Beijing center to help develop ``future technology'' for its global operations, Minomo, 51, said. The company expects to have fourth-generation technology ready in five years, with wide availability of the technology coming in 10 years, he said.

Next year, China is expected to grant licenses for 3G service that transmits data at speeds of up to 384 kilobits per second.

``A 4G system can transmit data at speeds between 100 megabits and 1 gigabit per second,'' Minomo said. At 1 gigabit, a 4G standard could stream data up to 3,000 times faster than the leading-edge technology that China is about to license, he said.

China has 353.7 million cell phone users, accounting for about a quarter of its population, according to a May 23 report on the Ministry of Information Industry's Web site. While the country is focusing on 3G, its telecommunication operators have set up the China Communications Standards Association to look into a 4G or an enhanced 3G standard, Minomo said.

Technology Transfer

``Our Beijing lab will help establish NTT DoCoMo's future collaboration with China,'' he said. ``If some superior research is done in our lab, we would transfer it back to Japan.''

DoCoMo lags behind in the high-speed market in Japan with 12.9 million users, compared with 18.5 million for KDDI. Japan has about a fifth of the world's 156 million 3G users, according to 3Gtoday.com, an Internet site operated by Qualcomm Inc.

DoCoMo has research centers in Japan, the U.S. and Germany that focus on future technologies.

``Beijing's lab plays a very important role for DoCoMo,'' Minomo said. ``It is the only lab where we focus on nothing but this future technology, 4G, and even technology beyond 4G.''

Shares of DoCoMo, which have fallen 13 percent this year compared with a 0.2 percent gain in the benchmark Topix index, rose 2,000 yen to 164,000 yen as of 11 a.m. in Tokyo. KDDI rose 2,000 yen to 502,000 yen.



To contact the reporter on this story:
Allen T. Cheng in Beijing at [e-mail]
Last Updated: June 13, 2005 22:52 EDT