NTT DoCoMo CEO Ryuji Yamada has confirmed that the Japanese operator is actively looking at making further investments in mobile firms in Asia. “Our main target is Asia, and there are some other [promising] countries there. We are in contact [with carriers in those countries],” Yamada told Reuters in an interview yesterday. He added that DoCoMo is also looking at technological cooperation with one of the large Chinese mobile operators but ruled out any capital investment in the country. “Those are real giants and buying a stake of only a few percent could cost us several hundred billion yen, and acquiring such stakes would not make much business sense for us,” he said.

Last year, DoCoMo set a target of achieving 10 percent of its sales from foreign ventures in a decade to compensate for slowing growth in the Japanese market. It already owns stakes in India’s sixth-largest mobile operator, Tata Teleservices (26 percent), Bangladesh’s third-largest mobile operator, Aktel (30 percent), and Malaysia’s U-Mobile (16.5 percent). Yamada did not name any specific new markets or operators it was targeting. On the domestic front, Yamada noted that DoCoMo was the first to launch a phone on the Android platform and plans to add more Android phones to its portfolio by early next year.