Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo may miss its end of fiscal year 3G-subscriber target for the second year running.

The president of DoCoMo said they had expected to have signed up 1.38 million FOMA subscribers by 31 March 2003.

At the end of July, they had only secured 127,400 customers. DoCoMo says there will need to be a significant increase in its monthly take-up rate to have any hope of meeting its target. In March this year FOMA subscriptions were 61,000 short of their 150,000 target.

Since its launch in October 2001 FOMA has added an average of 11,581 customers per month and during the second quarter of 2002 its monthly net additions dropped sharply from 16,100 in April to 6,800 in May and just 2,200 in June. This decline came largely in response to the April launch of KDDI’s rival 3G service that is priced lower than FOMA and also provides superior coverage and backwards compatibility with second generation CDMA services. Average monthly subscriptions for KDDI’s CDMA2000 service are running at 410,975.

Following a reduction in its service pricing FOMA subscriptions increased to 12,900 in July. However in order to meet its March 2003 target DoCoMo would need 3G monthly additions to reach five-fold that of FOMA’s best-ever month consistently for the next eight months (including August).

Although the latest round of tariff reductions appear to have a positive effect on 3G take-up,with FOMA’s average revenue per user dropping below that of second generation services DoCoMo will not be keen to undertake further price cuts.