{"id":338648,"date":"2010-02-19T05:20:33","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T10:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/?p=26794"},"modified":"2010-02-19T05:20:33","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T10:20:33","slug":"2-2-billion-liabilities-japan%e2%80%99s-wireless-carrier-willcom-files-for-bankruptcy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/338648","title":{"rendered":"$2.2 billion liabilities: Japan\u2019s wireless carrier Willcom files for bankruptcy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Wikipedia has a pretty useful list<\/a> of countries by number of mobile phones in use, which shows that Japan (with around 100 million users) is the No. 7 in the world. The market is largely controlled by mobile carriers NTT Docomo<\/a>, KDDI au<\/a> and SoftBank Mobile<\/a> but seemed big enough to offer enough room for a number of smaller competitors, too.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, however, a company called Willcom<\/a> (one of said smaller players) announced it had to file for bankruptcy. The reason: With just $54 million in capital, Willcom managed to amass a whopping $2.2 billion in liabilities. It’s the biggest bankruptcy ever in Japan’s hyper-competitive mobile industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Willcom, best known in Japan as a PHS provider, has continuously lost subscribers to the country’s big three carriers in recent months, which means the bankruptcy didn’t come as a big surprise. The company won a license to provide high-speed wireless web connections in 2007 but didn’t have the money to properly develop the service.<\/p>\n

It currently has 4.3 million customers in Japan, while market leader Docomo has 56 million (KDDI au: 31 million, SoftBank: 22 million).<\/p>\n

Willcom is 60% owned by American private equity firm Carlyle Group<\/a> (which paid $330 million back in 2004 for the stake), while Kyocera<\/a> holds 30% and KDDI holds another 10% of shares. Willcom is now said to be seeking support from the Japanese government, SoftBank and a local private equity firm called Advantage Partners<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Wikipedia has a pretty useful list of countries by number of mobile phones in use, which shows that Japan (with around 100 million users) is the No. 7 in the world. The market is largely controlled by mobile carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank Mobile but seemed big enough to offer enough room for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3524,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-338648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3524"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}