Not-so-big is beautiful

摘要

It was supposed to be a crystal ball, but turned out to be an Achilles heel. Voda-fone, the world's largest mobile operator, took control of J-Phone, Japan's third-largest operator, in 2001 with two aims: to exploit Japan's lead in mobile telecoms to boost Vodafone's fortunes elsewhere, and to use Vodafone's global scale to win a larger share of the Japanese market. But J-Phone, which was renamed Vodafone in 2003, instead ran into trouble. Customers began defecting in droves to its two larger rivals, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, and the firm's market share, which had increased for five years in a row, began to fall.