Supercharging Whom ? Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility

"Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google's patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." That's how Larry Page explains the twelve billion purchase in the official Google blog.

The blog is titled "Supercharging Android: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility"*, but one could wonder who will be supercharged in the end. Third parties and endusers may start asking themselves what will come out of a landscape where former archrivals Microsoft and Nokia tie the knot, or where the mother of all netcos swallows a former giant manufacturer. SonyEricsson theoretically went even further on the value chain, but the union was celebrated in completely different times, when networks were not precisely clogged with mobile internet traffic.

More moves are expected. Apple has been rumored to be in a mega purchasing mood for quite awhile, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Samsung making something big. Lee Kun-hee just pointed out the necessity for the company to evolve, an evidence we recently repeated (see "Huawei Vision : a view from the cloud"). This should go beyond such acquisition as Grandis, a specialist in memory wolfed down earlier this month by the South Korean chaebol.

Anyway, the Motorola episode reassesses the importance of patents in the legal war raging worldwide. Apple claimed a few significant victories : a big chunk of Nortel patents, plus a suspension of Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales in key markets.

The problem is Apple is not John Grisham, an entity that makes money with legal stuff. Being the next NTP is not exactly "cool".

And the consumer is not likely to beg "supercharge me".

mot-bile 2011

* where the king of the 80s is kindly put at the same level as bankrupt Nortel : an empty shell with a collection of patents

3Greenfield Japan

So Livedoor eventually didn't get a 3G license in Japan (see "Livedoor to incumbents : you've got mail"), and the winners are IPMobile, Softbank BB & eAccess. Actually, I'm not so sure one can talk about "winners"...

• IPMobile are already looking for M-VNOs to fill their TD-CDMA pipes (Roll-out : 3,000 BS by end 2007, 8,500 by end 2012 - QoS : 5.2 Mbps downlink, 858 Kbps uplink - TTM october 2006). M-VNOs can be turned down by DoCoMo (network saturation) and Vodafone KK (coverage), but will they really invest in UMTS TDD instead of IPMobile rivals' W-CDMA / HSDPA or KDDI's CDMA2000 ? The good news for IPWireless is their orders are up. The bad news is they might have to pay for them.
• eAccess branded their greenfield MNO eMobile, which sounds like immobile (fixed, unmovable). The fact is they don't seem in such a hurry : they didn't even complete their business plan before getting the license and their TTM is only March 2007 for a regional launch (National coverage is supposed to be completed by March 2008). eMobile aim at 5M subs after 5 years of operation but even after purchasing AOL Japan last year, eAccess only claim 2.1M subs - besides, dial-up still represents one third of their turnover. TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting Systems, Inc) bring an interesting media / broadband / broadcasting flavor, but they just take 14% of the responsibilities. New partners are welcome but who wants to fight with DoCoMo at home, where even Master Voda struggles for his life ? If no one shows up soon, at least there will be some spectrum for sale.
• Among the three, Softbank looks like the little pig with the house made of stone : if the Yahoo! deals were already good clicks, Japan Telecom brought actual mortar and unlike Livedoor's Takafumi Horie, Masayoshi Son is now part of the Japanese establishment. TTM is not as aggressive as for IPMobile and one can smile at BB Mobile's "mobile triple play" (voice, video and data !) trials with LG Electronics and Nortel ("pre-WiMAX (802.16e)" + HSDPA), but no one should take TV Bank for a new gadget : this new venture will open early 2006 in East-Asia's leading hubs (Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo). And beyond Japan, Son opened a promising front in China through Taiwan.

NTT DoCoMo are claiming they fear no one and they could be right. But the chances of disruption remain unnerving enough.

Handle with e-care - China-aware pro gaming

Still keepin' an eye on SKT's stats, and especially TU media (following Slomobile TV) : now covering 84 cities, the mobile TV service claimed 200,000 subs after almost 5 months of operation. That's about 1,400 customers a day, but this average is supposed to be 2,400 nowadays (the first 100k took 2 months and 22 days, the last 2 months and 6 days). 90 more days at this pace would bring them over 400k subs at the end of the year and I guess they can push to an average 3,500 with the high season coming but they'd need a strong 4,500 to reach their original 600,000 target.
More impressive : last summer and 5 years after launch, e-Station (SKT's e-CRM portal) signed its 10th million customer. The service averages 160K users per day (70% being in their 20s-30s) and 16.4M acts per month (about 3 times as much as over the phone). Many MNOs would die for such figures.
For those as well : over 94% of SKT's customers are equiped with cdma2000 phones, now dubbed "2.5G"*. 84% have color screens and 52% are active Nate users. The mobile portal keeps improving and proposing new services, but the operator knows "wireless internet" is not the only field beyond voice. Hard to tell how m-finance and banking are contributing.
As far as international is concerned, I'm still expecting some juicy fruits from the SKT-Earthlink partnership, but the only news came from the MNO's professional gamers' team, T1, which drafted two Starcraft players from China. I don't know whether these hardcore gamers are ready to die for their new bosses but the mobile arena could be safer than a PC Bang : a 23 year old Briton, Darren Prior, was recently saved by his LG U8210 during a bank robbery, the handset stopping the bullet.
Welcome to Korea, the country where operators become bankers and handset manufacturers life insurers.

* still no specific statistics for EV-DO, but good news for 3G UMTS : since SKT are preparing commercial launch of HSDPA early 2006 (Nortel-LG to deliver the goods), they are pushing W-CDMA as well in the South : commercial launch this November for Jeju-do, Jeolla-do and Gyeongsang-do + Busan.