This Week in Japan
Friday, May 10, 2019
The latest headlines in Japan for the week of May 6 2019
Top news stories for the week of May 6, 2019
Mobile Phone Fees to be Lowered After New Law
This week the Japanese government enacted legislation to stir the status quo of Japan’s mobile carriers. The saturated market has notoriously been customer unfriendly so the new legislation aims to change that. The new rules forbids carriers from offering mobile plans that include both the price of the phone and monthly service fees in a bundle plan. Up to now, most mobile companies offered discounts on mobile phones if users opt of a two-year contract but in turn the data fees tended to be high.
This system masked the carrier charges from the customer and made it difficult to compare costs between various companies. With this new legislation coming into play from this fall, mobile carriers have already started offering lower rates and separating the cost of the mobile phone from the monthly plans.
To read more, here are some useful links:
Pre-School Education to be Made Free
Part of Abe’s Womenomics plan was to offer additional state sponsored child support to encourage women re-enter the work force after having children. As part of that plan, the government enacted legislation this week making preschool education free. The government will use the funds from the consumption tax hike in October to fund these state sponsored education programs.
Opposition leaders criticised the legislation by saying that the first priority should have been about reducing the number of children on waiting lists for day care and nursery school rather than focusing on preschool education.
To read more, here are some useful links:
Yahoo Japan to Become Softbank Subsidiary
Softbank is currently a 12 % stakeholder in Yahoo Japan. As of next month they will have acquired 45% of Yahoo Japan’s equity stake ostensibly making Yahoo Japan a subsidiary of Softbank.
Due to the newly enacted legislation that will cut mobile carrier rates Softbank is looking at lower annual profit relative to the previous year, but by incorporating Yahoo Japan as a subsidiary, Softbank believes it will give the company a more competitive edge and the consolidated sales for the company is expected to grow by 2.1 %.
To read more, here are some useful links:
Toyota and Panasonic to jointly build "Smart Towns"
Toyota and Panasonic have announced a merger of their housing units that is an expansion of their existing collaboration for the development of “smart town” technology. “Smart Town” technology is the development of next generation devices that connects homes and vehicles to the Internet in the facilitation of a “smart lifestyle.”
This is one of several joint efforts between the two companies, earlier this year they joined together in the development of electronic vehicle (EV) batteries, bringing together R&D resources and manufacturing expertise from electronics and auto making to facilitate the production of newer technologies.
To read more, here are some useful links:
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