NTT DoCoMo dumps AOL
Japan’s largest mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo, has pulled out of its joint venture with AOL.
"DoCoMo said it had sold all of its 20,980 shares in Japanese Internet service provider DoCoMo AOL to the U.S. partner," says a Reuters report here.
The deal comes at an awkward time for AOL, which has been seeing droves of customers flee to lower-cost competitors and high-speed Internet providers, says the report.
DoCoMo and AOL had intended through the joint venture to provide a new service linking personal computers and cell phones over the Internet but, "Japanese media reports said the company, which does not disclose subscriber numbers, had problems attracting customers from the beginning."
DoCoMo AOL Chief Executive Takashi Yamakawa told Reuters, "Part of the reason was that the parent company AOL was only focused on the U.S. market. They didn’t care about Japan operations because the U.S. business was growing so rapidly."
AOL is currently the subject of two federal investigations into past accounting practices.
