It has been a big day for acquisitions in Japan. As we previously mentioned, Nexon’s acquisition of social game developer Gloops for $469 million dollars. Surprisingly, that was not the most expensive pickup today, as mobile carrier Softbank’s (TSE:9984) purchase of rival eAccess (TYO:9427) came in at the price of $1.84 billion. Softbank will reportedly pay more than triple eAccess’s trading price in the deal.
Reuters cites Softbank’s Masayoshi Son as saying that this acquisition of eAccess and its eMobile subscribers will bring Softbank’s total subscriber count to 39 million. Although it looks like Son is including Willcom’s 4.7 million subscribers in that total [1]. Willcom was purchased by Softbank back in December of 2010.
KDDI had about 35.9 million subscribers as of the end of August. So if we just look at eAccess’s 4.1 million eMobile subscribers [2], then strictly speaking Softbank Mobile – with its 30.1 million subscribers – still trails KDDI as the nation’s third carrier.
Japan’s leading mobile carrier, of course, is still NTT Docomo with 60.6 million subscribers at the end of August. But the race for second just got a lot more interesting!
Check out our interactive breakdown of Japan’s mobile subscriber numbers below. Figures are according to the Telecommunications Carriers Association. Note that eAccess subsidiary, eMobile, stopped reporting its totals late in 2011.
[Via Reuters]
[Download image version of this chart]
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The Telecommunications Carriers Association of Japan lists Willcom subscribers separately from Softbanks. ↩
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This total comes from eAccess’s financial report released this past August, claiming 4.1 million mobile broadband subscribers ↩
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