Japan’s largest mobile carrier, NTT DoCoMo, is open to a deal to carry Apple’s iPhone, the company’s president said in a Japanese newspaper report, translated and disseminated by BrightWire Friday.
President Katoru Katō reportedly said that his company was eager to add the iPhone to its lineup, but that concerns over alleged sales quotas imposed by Apple had been a previous point of contention. Mr. Katō now says that DoCoMo could meet those quotas as long as the iPhone accounted for 20 to 30 percent of its overall smartphone sales.
Apple’s iPhone is currently available in Japan on DoCoMo’s smaller competitors, au (KDDI) and SoftBank, a fact which cost the larger carrier a net loss of over 40,000 subscribers in the most recent quarter, according to Reuters. The loss was the largest ever recorded by the company and was blamed in large part by the launch of the iPhone 5, which drew record numbers of subscribers to au and Softbank.
DoCoMo is still the largest Japanese mobile carrier by far and, like nearby China Mobile, supports well over half of the country’s customers. A deal by Apple to secure the iPhone on either Asian network would have the potential to generate hundreds of millions of additional iDevice sales each year.
[via The Next Web]