Disney Mobile not dead in Japan — not even close

Serkan Toto of Tech Crunch brings up an interesting point:

In Japan, Disney strategically about-faced by pursuing an OEM-like strategy: They leave back-end operations (distribution, price planning, sales, billing, etc.) to their partner and focus on bringing content, design know-how and brand value into the partnership.
This was a prominent topic at the Prepaid Press Expo, particularly in the session I moderated on the future of MVNOs. Both Paris Holt of telSPACE and Daniel Csoka of AKOS Technology Corporation mentioned the separation of content and back-end functions being key to the future success of MVNOs. Neat that we’re seeing a story about just that. This also touches on the MVNO 2.0 concept we discussed earlier this month. Disney is trying something totally different, not only with the content/billing strategy, but with their target audience of women in their 20s and 30s. Jason Ankeny of Fierce Mobile Content asked back in January if Disney was “too Goofy to succeed” in Japan. Looks like Disney’s surprising us all.]]>

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1 Comment

  1. Lars on August 26, 2008 at 6:53 pm

    Hi Joe:
    It was a logical move by Disney Japan. They have been quite successful over the years with major content offerings across all three carrier decks so the move to get their own branded handsets and buy big buckets of voice/data from SoftBank makes perfect sense.
    In effect they are more like a mvCo (content) play and we would not be surprised to see a few more coming up!
    Cheers.. 😎