December 18, 2001
Yamaha Corp. is pleased to announce that it will provide a 16-note polyphonic cellular phone ringing tone download service to KPN Mobile N.V., a Dutch wireless operator 15 percent owned by NTT DoCoMo Inc., to coincide with KPN Mobile's launch of the i-mode wireless internet service in The Netherlands and Belgium sometime after the Spring of 2002.
Of The Netherlands's total population of 15.3 million, about 11.5 million people use cell phones, making it a country with one of the highest cell phone diffusion rates in Europe. Of these, KPN Mobile NL has the largest market share with 5.21 million subscribers, or 45 percent of the total. In Belgium, where 6.3 million of the country's 10 million people own cell phones, KPN Orange has 900,000 subscribers.
Monotone cell phone ringing tones are very popular in Europe although they are highly priced. Yamaha expects substantial demand for its reasonably priced, high-quality ringing tone service, which has become available now thanks to KPN Mobile's introduction of i-mode in Europe.
Yamaha is one of the leading providers of ringing melodies to cell phones, offering a choice of more than 6,000 songs to over 3 million subscribers in Japan. The Company has decided to take advantage of this experience and its extensive archive of song data to expand operations overseas with the distribution of high quality, polyphonic ringing tone melodies.
NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service operates on packet-switched networks and allows users convenient access to online services such as banking, local area information as well as the ability to download a wide range of ringing tones. Since it started in February 1999, the number of i-mode subscribers has grown to about 30 million. Yamaha aims to take advantage of the increased flexibility offered by i-mode to enable Europeans cell phone users to enjoy its multi-tone ringing service.
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