Japan 5G: Government Will Promote Use of Public Infrastructure to Speed Deployment

Japan Telcos - Regulator to Lower Cap for Early Mobile Contract Cancellation: Positive for Rakuten

Japan Mobile: MVNO Growth Record Low for Second Straight Quarter

Japan Mobile: MVNO Data for Q3 Includes Slowest Growth Since 2014 but that Makes Sense for Rakuten

Rakuten: Lyft IPO Provides Timely Support for Mobile Deployment

Japan 5G Spectrum Allocations In-Line With Expectations

Telco/Internet specialist

Kirk Boodry

Redex Research

Equity Bottom-Up

<p><a href="https://www.smartkarma.com/entities/31" target="_blank" data-smartkarma-citation="entities:31:1">Rakuten Inc (4755 JP)</a> hosted a call with CTO Tareq Amin to update analysts and investors on recent progress. The company says cell site acquisition is moving ahead quickly and it an end-October mobile launch remains the target. As discussed previously, the next major milestone is the start of 1 July beta-testing so there was little that could be added this week although management did again run through key success factors like cost and operational efficiency from its cloud-based integrated network architecture. Mr. Amin teased a possible game-changing announcement next week, which is likely to come from the vendor side and we suspect has to do with 5G turnkey solutions. Coming out of quarterly results for all companies, the outlook has not meaningfully changed with incumbents confident that pricing changes are sufficient even with Rakuten promising disruption from a unique network and installed base of eCommerce/fintech users. </p>

Rakuten Inc (4755 JP) hosted a call with CTO Tareq Amin to update analysts and investors on recent progress. The company says cell site acquisition is moving ahead quickly and it an end-October mobile launch remains the target. As discussed previously, the next major milestone is the start of 1 July beta-testing so there was little that could be added this week although management did again run through key success factors like cost and operational efficiency from its cloud-based integrated network architecture. Mr. Amin teased a possible game-changing announcement next week, which is likely to come from the vendor side and we suspect has to do with 5G turnkey solutions. Coming out of quarterly results for all companies, the outlook has not meaningfully changed with incumbents confident that pricing changes are sufficient even with Rakuten promising disruption from a unique network and installed base of eCommerce/fintech users. 

NTT (Nippon Telegraph & Telephone) (9432 JP)

楽天：モバイル事業の最新情報は概ね好調