Japan's largest mobile-phone operator, NTT DoCoMo,will be flexible in negotiations with Apple Inc. to offer the iPhone, President Ryuji Yamada said, reports Bloomberg News.
``It's common sense that Apple wants to sell as many iPhones worldwide as possible and to customize it would be difficult,'' Yamada, who took over as president last month, said in a Bloomberg interview. ``Our stance on the iPhone remains flexible,'' he said, without elaborating.
Yamada faces a shrinking market share for DoCoMo, whose lineup of mobile phones and services offers little distinction from that of Softbank Corp. and KDDI Corp. DoCoMo, which includes its trademark i-mode Web-browsing software in all handsets, lost out to Softbank for the right to sell the iPhone from July 11.
``Adding the i-mode function would mean more time spent
on development,'' Kenji Nishimura, a Tokyo-based analyst at Deutsche Bank AG, who has a ``hold'' rating on DoCoMo, said in an interview yesterday. The Tokyo-based company's introduction of the iPhone ``is a matter of timing,'' he said.
Softbank may sell about 1 million of the handsets in six months to a year, according to Nishimura.
