KPN Of the Netherlands Shows Good Financial Results
KPN, a dutch carrier with operations in Holland, Belgium and Germany posted some solid quarterly results. This is hot on the heels of Deutsche Telekom's good results yesterday. Are we seeing a return to stability in the EU mobile industry? It appears so, as carriers manage to grapple with their debt burdens, and even reduce them. Notably understated in the KPN quarterly report was the performance of iMode at KPN. KPN adopted iMode about a year ago, but as of yet have only 285k of 13.6M subscribers on board. Based on AT&T Wireless, KPN, and other iMode adopters, it appears the promise of iMode is not delivering in the export markets. This was predictable: iMode is not a technology, but more of a business model built with the strong market power of DoCoMo and a community of Japanese content developers. How does DoCoMo's export market power, and how does KPN transfer cool applications for Japanese train schedules to Amsterdam? That said, it appears KPN still intends to register 1M iMode users by year end. If they succeed, it will be a credit to their own marketing and content acquiring ability, but not a result of using iMode.
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