DoCoMo reports 41.3% quarterly rise in profits

Japan's leading mobile carrier DoCoMo's profit for the April-June quarter jumped 41.3% from a year earlier on strong sales of mobile phone handsets and a rise in the number of subscribers, an Associated Press report said.

DoCoMo's net profit stood at 173.5 billion yen (€1.03 billion, US$1.6 billion), while its pretax profit gained 40.4% to 288.4 billion yen (€1.7 billion, US$2.7 billion).

'Our profits rose as sales of new mobile handsets went well and also the number of subscribers increased during the quarter,' said DoCoMo spokesman Taishi Hoshino, quoted by the report.

The number of new subscribers rose by 240,000 during the April-June quarter to 53.63 million. DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile phone company, holds some 50% of the Japanese mobile phone market, Hoshino said.

Revenue in the April-June quarter slipped 1.11% to 1.17 trillion yen (€6.9 billion, US$10.8 billion).

For the current fiscal year through March 2009, DoCoMo projects a net profit of 503 billion yen (€2.9 billion, US$4.7 billion) and revenue of 4.77 trillion yen (€27 billion, US$44 billion), the Associated Press report further said.