Mobile infrastructure market in Japan fell 19 percent year-over-year in 2014, to $4.1 billion, as 3G investments in the region stalled, according to Infonetics Research. Infonetics expects the 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE mobile infrastructure market in Japan to fall to $2 billion in 2019, a 2014-2019 CAGR of -13 percent, before 5G ramps up. Japan had 145,053,600 mobile subscribers in 2014, up 6 percent over 2013.
This is driven by the fact that all three Japanese mobile operators, KDDI, NTT DOCOMO and SoftBank Mobile, have passed critical LTE mass deployments and will be tactically adding new macro eNodeBs while gearing up for 3.5GHz small cell deployments for capacity upgrades in 2016. Among Japan's mobile operators, only KDDI and NTT DOCOMO increased LTE spending in 2014; Softbank Mobile slashed its total mobile spend by a quarter, said Infonetics.
Stéphane Téral, Research Director for Mobile Infrastructure and Carrier Economics at Infonetics Research.
As we forecast, the Japanese mobile infrastructure dropped by double digits in 2014 as a severe cut in 3G investments drove a decline that LTE could not offset despite the addition of over 100,000 eNodeBs.
