Docomo 'planning' London listing

JAPANESE mobile phones giant NTT Docomo is planning to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange and Wall Street in early March as part of its globalisation programme.

Docomo controls 60% of Japan's mobile market and is not expected to use the listing to raise funds. It wants to widen its sources of long-term capital for future expansion, according to reports in Japan, although the company said no decision had been reached.

The company, led by president Keiji Tachikawa and 67% owned by the government-controlled Nippon Telegraph and Telephone fixed-line operator, postponed plans for a London listing in the wake of the 11 September attacks on the US.

Docomo has enjoyed phenomenal growth in the Japanese mobile phones market, and by the end of last year had almost 40m subscribers.

Its most successful product has been the i-mode data service which provides users with internet connections giving entertainment information, news, banking, stock market quotes and other information. Since the i-mode service, which accesses 50,000 web sites, was introduced in 1999, and became a must-have for Japanese teenagers, subscriptions-have rocketed to 30m three times the company's original target.

Group profits have soared from 21.4bn yen (£114m) in 1996 to 365.5bn yen in the year to March 2001. The shares have failed to keep up with the surge in profits, as the slide in the Japanese economy dragged down the stock and the price fell from its 10-year peak of 7.6m yen in 1999 to 1.1m yen in mid-December last year, the lowest for a decade, before recovering to 1.4m yen earlier this week.

The overseas listings are part of an ambitious plan to push Docomo's third-generation (3G) services, which it pioneered, around the world. In Britain it has partnered Hong Kong-controlled Hutchison Whampoa and the Dutch KPN Mobile in Hutchison 3G, in which Docomo bought a 20% stake for £1.2bn in September 2000.

It also has big plans for 3G services in the rest of Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region and has stated that it will be rolling out i-mode type services in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands by the end of the second quarter of this year. In the US it has partnered AT&T Wireless in an enterprise to expand the use of wireless data around the country.