TOKYO-NTT DoCoMo Inc. said the telecommunications giant would pay half the costs of developing W-CDMA handsets for its FOMA network in an attempt to boost the supply and cut costs of handsets for its customers.
The company said it would provide up to $340 million in subsidies per year to handset manufacturers including NEC Corp., Fujitsu Ltd. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. The subsidies are expected to cut FOMA handset prices from about $300 per model to around $250 per handset.
Analysts said the move should help NTT DoCoMo sign up additional customers to its service that had attracted only 152,000 subscribers at the end of last year, which was well below company estimates and a fraction of the 4.8 million customers rival KDDI Corp. had signed up for its cdma2000 1x-based service.
