SoftBank cut retailer fees 35 percent to defend its small merchant point of sale service, operated with PayPal, from an attack by rival Square.
In October of 2003, SoftBank had launched a price war with Rakuten, Japan’s biggest Internet mall, by cutting fees for merchants to use SoftBank's online shopping portal.
Those moves are consistent with SoftBank's approach to pricing for mobile service. SoftBank, it is fair to say, surprised the two larger Japanese mobile firms when it launched a price war upon acquiring Vodafone's Japan business, which had struggled to get market share.
Since 2006, SoftBank has maintained it always would offer lower prices than the other carriers.
So many believe Sprint will do so as well, once SoftBank has put all the necessary pieces into place in the U.S. market.
T-Mobile US already is attacking the market with lower prices, and seems to be taking market share primarily from AT&T.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Why Sprint is Certain to Launch a Price War
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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