This blog comes about a week too late but still is valid I guess. In my class Competitive Strategies and Dynamics: winning in technology markets, we had the no small job of analyzing the largest mobile company in Japan, NTT DoCoMo, and figure out new ways for the company to make money in a very commoditized market. To put some extra pressure on the group, NTT DoCoMo sent one of their R&D managers to meet up with us, 13 hours from Japan to Boston.

NTT DoCoMo is by far the largest company in the Japanese mobile market with about 99 million customers (to compare, the Norwegian government has about 4.77 million “customers”). But as in many other countries, the price for mobile services become cheaper and cheaper and hard to make money from. So in order to solve this problem, they turned to six bright MIT Sloan students: Bharat, Tim, Garrett, Takashi and Jimmy. They were from India, South-Korea, USA, Japan and Taiwan respectively. 6 team members, 6 nations. Daizo was the DoCoMo representative, while professor Weil supervised us.

DoCoMo has the largest customer base in Japan, as well as a huge infrastructure. This provides more customer information than any other companies. Japan is a world leading country in absorbing new mobile services and applications. It should have every possibility to achieve success also in the future. I shouldn’t say too much about the details of our strategy, but apparently it was a really good one when thinking about the grade we got!

It was a great project to work on and a great bunch of team mates. Too bad we didn’t get more chance to hang out!

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The NTT DoCoMo team:

(from left) Takashi (Japan), Garrett (USA), Jimmy (Taiwan), Daizo (NTT DoCoMo, Japan), Professor Weil (UK), Yours truly (Norskie), Tim (Korea), Bharat (India)