Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, Economist
Livedoor and Fuji-TV
New economy (Livedoor) is knocking at the door of old economy (Fuji-TV) (for details see our "Japan's Media" report):
Below is an outline of the take-over battle raging right now. The complex cross-shareholding is puzzling, and the reason for it is surprising to the uninitiated: a long time ago there was no radio and no TV, only newspapers. Radio in Japan was born as babies of newspaper companies, and TV stations were born as babies of the Radio stations. So at the beginning Fuji-TV was a tiny in-company venture subsidiary of Japan-Radio (Nihon Hosou). The cross-share holding structure dates from these pioneering days of TV in Japan and has not been touched since - until Livedoor's Horie came along.
Horie's nickname in Japan is Horiemon. By the way: some media falsely report that Horie is the founder of Livedoor. This is not the case. Horie-san founded a website design company called "Livin' On the EDGE Inc" in 1996, later renamed EDGE, and many other companies. In 2002 he acquired the free email/ISP company Livedoor.
This battle stimulated us to release our "Japan Media" report.
Below is an outline of the take-over battle raging right now. The complex cross-shareholding is puzzling, and the reason for it is surprising to the uninitiated: a long time ago there was no radio and no TV, only newspapers. Radio in Japan was born as babies of newspaper companies, and TV stations were born as babies of the Radio stations. So at the beginning Fuji-TV was a tiny in-company venture subsidiary of Japan-Radio (Nihon Hosou). The cross-share holding structure dates from these pioneering days of TV in Japan and has not been touched since - until Livedoor's Horie came along.
Horie's nickname in Japan is Horiemon. By the way: some media falsely report that Horie is the founder of Livedoor. This is not the case. Horie-san founded a website design company called "Livin' On the EDGE Inc" in 1996, later renamed EDGE, and many other companies. In 2002 he acquired the free email/ISP company Livedoor.
This battle stimulated us to release our "Japan Media" report.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Financials: DoCoMo, KDDI, Vodafone
The following figure compares Sales (Financial year ending March 31, 2004), Net profits after taxes(Financial year ending March 31, 2004), and market capitalization (as of February 17, 2005) for DoCoMo, KDDI and Vodafone (in each case consolidated for the global company):
Friday, February 18, 2005
PENCK (KDDI-AU Designer Series)
Today, February 18, KDDI-AU came out with PENCK - the latest model in the Designer Series:
Data rate = 2.4 Mbps
Music = Chaku-Uta-Full, stereo speakers
Camera = 1.24 Megapixel, incl QR barcode reader
GPS = incl. Naviwalk navigation
and more...
Data rate = 2.4 Mbps
Music = Chaku-Uta-Full, stereo speakers
Camera = 1.24 Megapixel, incl QR barcode reader
GPS = incl. Naviwalk navigation
and more...
