Business briefing materials etc.

February 24, 2021: Consumer mobile service's new plan briefing

(*) This is a summary of questions and answers took place at the Briefing.

Question: Your new plan seems quite reasonable compared with peers. What did you take into consideration when setting up your plan?

Answer: We took the followings into consideration: market situation, year over year decrease rate for mobile interconnectivity charge based on future cost method, expected decrease in voice communication wholesale price, and discussion at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and its study group.

Question: What would you do if your assumption about mobile interconnectivity charge as well as voice communication wholesale price, two factors you took into consideration when setting up the new plan, resulted differently?

Answer: We do not expect our assumption will be largely different as our assumption about them are based on very various information.

Question: Who do you target with this new plan?

Answer: When setting up this new plan, we thought about how customers’ needs have changed and diversified. Therefore, we target both new customers and current customers who are already using our consumer services. As the current users prefer low data volume plan, we expect 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB offerings among the new plan will be most popular.

Question: Your peers announced their new plans before you. How would you describe your current consumer mobile business?

Answer: We see that there were some impact when it comes to acquiring new customers as well as cancellation. Yet, we believe that with this new plan we should be able to acquire new customers and retain the current customer base.

Question: Please explain why you decided to renew the plan to offer various data volume, rather than just lowering the existing data volume plan.

Answer: Data volume needed by customers has been changing as larger screen and higher spec smart phones needing larger data volume while work-from-home let smaller data volume. Based on these circumstances, we decided to redesign the plan.

Question: Please educate us on why IIJ is offering 5G communication service (option) at free of charge when your peers are charging fees. Also, please comment on when you plan to offer 5G compatible phones among your mobile phone lineups.

Answer: The current 5G communication is based on NSA (Non-Stand Alone) which means using the existing 4G infrastructure. This basically implies that the speed is same level as 4G and users cannot really enjoy 5G merit. Because of this, we are not charging our users. As for 5G compatible phones, we are preparing to offer Android mainly.

Question: Please update us on voice communication function and 5G network for eSIM.

Answer: As of now, eSIM realized on IIJ’s full-MVNO facility is not supporting those features.

Question: Please tell us your mobile business strategy going forward.

Answer: Our mobile business strategy remains unchanged – we are to improve mobile service profitability by increasing its service facility utilization by gathering various traffic such as enterprise, IoT/M2M, and consumers well-balanced onto our common mobile infrastructure.