Success in Japan is almost never cheap, easy and quick. Vodafone acquired Japan Telecom including the mobile division J-Phone which at the time of acquisition by Vodafone was on third rank in Japan, but the fastest growing, and with some of the most interesting innovations, for example J-Phone brought the first camera phone to market globally — today its almost unthinkable to have a mobile phone without a camera, but J-Phone before the acquisition by Vodafone brought the first phone with a camera to market globally.
Read the detailed case story here:. For almost exactly the same reasons, and with almost exactly the same result. Read the case story here:. Here one example. However, what Vodafone overlooked was, that at that time DoCoMo had about 30, roaming customers, out of approx.
In there were about 2. Instead of focusing on its core business in Japan, Vodafone KK focused management resources, and other resources to try to influence political decisions concerning 2.
Vodafone had many other management issues in Japan, which included recruitment and personality and retain issues of top executives, many kinds of HR issues, management issues at the retail stores, handset planning issues, branding and brand management issues, localization issues and much more. This Japanese mobile phone industry veteran after a few weeks asked to be transferred from his executive CEO of Vodafone-Japan position to the non-executive Chairman position and soon after left Vodafone-Japan — clearly it took him only a few weeks to understand the hopelessness of the situation.
Your Name required. Your Email required. Your Message. Because Vodafone retains billion yen about USD 3. SBU The most important reason, according to Durkin, was that Vodafone brought in the wrong people to manage the company and kept bringing in new teams to fix the problems created by the last management team.
Durkin said he had worked for five presidents in five years at Vodafone. Worried about sinking profits in early , Vodafone brought in a new management team that was particularly dysfunctional. The British and Dutch managers were culturally insensitive to the point of racism, Durkin asserted. The Japanese managers and engineers were aware of the company's problems but were discouraged from saying anything and chose to keep silent. As a result, the company simply stopped functioning for about 9 months, according to Durkin.
The entire management team -- except for Durkin -- was fired in late , but it was too late for Vodafone to turn things around. Note, in a previous conversation, Durkin had talked about Vodafone's botched roll-out of its 3G phones in Japan and the fact that the 3G handsets, which it had successfully marketed as expensive, high-end devices in Europe, were regarded as clunky and poorly designed by Japanese consumers.
End Note. SBU The second problem for Vodafone was the higher expectations of profitability from the start among U. Japan was Vodafone's largest mobile market in terms of subscribers, but compared to other markets in which the company operated, the profit margins in Japan were very low, about ten per cent.
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