NTT DoCoMo’s fourth quarter profit fell 38% year-on-year, as quake expenses and a decline in revenue cut into on the company's bottom line.
Profit for the quarter to end-March fell to 46.5 billion yen (€383 million), while revenue dipped 2.6% to 1.04 trillion yen. For the full year, DoCoMo's profit was stable at 490.5 billion yen despite a 1.4% fall in revenues to 4.22 trillion yen.
Full year operating profit grew 1.3% to 850 billion Yen – a figure chiefRyuji Yamada said would have been closer to 870 billion Yen but for costs associated with an earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March.
The firm racked up 7.1 billion yen worth of quake-related expenses in fiscal 4Q.
Around 6,700 base stations were knocked out of commission by the earthquake and tsunami, but the company hopes to have all base stations outside of a 30km radius of the Fukushima nuclear plant restored by May 31.
Yamada revealed the firm will spend 30 billion yen on recovery, including 10 billion yen for full restoration and 20 billion yen to implement new disaster preparedness measures.
ARPU fell 5.2% to 5,070 yen during the full year. Voice revenue fell by 198.3 billion yen, but DoCoMo said its efforts to increase data usage led to packet revenue growing by 1.06 billion yen.
DoCoMo added 1.93 million mobile subscribers during the year, and launched its LTE service, Xi, which by the end of March had around 25,000 subscribers.
Yamada said this was only half the company's target of 50,000 for the period, but added that the company will go after a million subscribers in the current financial year.
The company forecasts a 2.3% increase in net profit and a 0.1% rise in operating revenues for this year.
IE Research analyst Yui Funayama told Telecoms Europe.net the earthquake is not expected to have a significant financial impact on Japanese mobile operator’s earnings in the long term.