Whats the secret to DoCoMos success?
Tachikawa: We were founded only eight years ago, and had less than one million customers. Then Japanese consumers came to understand that mobile phones were very useful. Since 1994, the number of customers has doubled every year. Now we have more than 60 million customers. And demand is still strong. TIME: Didn’t demands from the U.S. that Japan deregulate its phone industry have a lot to do with an increase in competition and declining connection rates that spurred the growth of the industry? Tachikawa: American people misunderstand Japan. The mobile communication industry in Japan, by 1998, was open to everybody. It was not closed as American people thought. TIME: But the start of deregulation happened in the early 1990s, so wasn’t that really what created a competitive environment? Tachikawa: No. In 1994 there were some newcomers; there were six groups competing with each other. We lost market share. In 1996, we had only 48% of the market. But my predecessor took strong measures to
