Japan's NTT DoCoMo eyes Millicom's Cambodia network

By Mayumi Negishi and Reiji Murai

TOKYO, Aug 7 - Japan's top wireless operator NTT DoCoMo Inc <9437.T> is interested in buying Luxembourg-based telecom operator Millicom's Cambodian network to boost its presence in Southeast Asia, an executive said.

Cash-rich DoCoMo, which controls half of Japan's mobile market, is hungry for acquisitions in other parts of Asia as growth slows in markets at home, in the U.S. and in Europe.

But DoCoMo has not decided to make a bid for Mobitel, which sources have priced at several hundred million dollars, and will consider other M&A targets in Cambodia and political and economic risks, said Toshinari Kunieda, senior vice president and managing director of DoCoMo's global business.

"It's like a marriage proposal -- you don't make an offer the day after falling in love at first sight, you look at other potential partners, too," Kunieda told Reuters in an interview on Friday. "But we will date."

DoCoMo is also hunting for investment targets in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and China, as well as in the Middle East, Oceania and Sri Lanka, as it chases a midterm target of boosting overseas revenues to 10 percent of its total sales in four to five years.

Based on its sales in the year ended in March, that would mean quadrupling its overseas revenues of 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion), of which about 60 percent now comes from roaming fees.

"It can't be done without M&A," Kunieda said. "We will have to hunt for a majority stake somewhere."

DoCoMo's recent foreign investments include a 26 percent stake in Tata Teleservices [TATASL.UL], India's sixth-largest mobile operator, a 30 percent stake in telecom operator Axiata's Bangladesh unit, and a 16.5 percent stake in Malaysian operator U-Mobile.

DoCoMo's shares closed up 1.2 percent, while those of No.2 Japanese carrier KDDI Corp <9433.T> rose 0.2 percent and third-ranked Softbank Corp <9984.T> fell 0.9 percent.

READY TO BET, AGAIN

DoCoMo incurred massive losses after spending nearly 1.9 trillion yen in the late 1990s and early 2000s to invest in overseas carriers to promote its i-mode mobile Internet technology and the W-CDMA 3G standard.

In Europe and the U.S., the company is now focusing on investing in software firms that could help DoCoMo raise its data-related revenues. It is not interested in Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile UK unit, Kunieda said.

Last month DoCoMo said it bought a 35 percent stake in NexWave Wireless Inc's software unit PacketVideo for $45.5 million to shore up its music and video services ahead of the planned launch of its high-speed LTE network next year.

But in Asia, DoCoMo is ready to bet big, and in some cases is only waiting for certain countries to relax their regulations on foreign telecom ownership.

DoCoMo, whose operating profit slid 15 percent in April-June on sluggish sign-ups, could look at Millicom's Sri Lanka asset, Celltel, among other possibilities, "but I can't say that we would pick Millicom," Kunieda said.

Millicom has appointed Goldman Sachs to advise on the sale of its Asian assets and said last month that it had several potential suitors.

Malaysian telecom firm Axiata has voiced interest in buying Millicom's Sri Lankan and Cambodian operations, both worth at least $500 million, while Russian operator VimpelCom may be interested in assets in Laos and Cambodia, sources told Reuters last month [ID:nKLR441625] [ID:nL9469191]. (Additional reporting by Saeed Azhar in Singapore; Editing by Chris Gallagher and Joseph Radford)

Higher incomes equal higher test results: study

Kyodo News
Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009

Elementary school students from high-income families scored notably higher than those from low-income families in last year's nationwide achievement exam, a government analysis of the results showed Tuesday.

Sixth-graders at public elementary schools whose parents earn ¥12 million or more scored 8 to 10 percentage points more than the national average in Japanese language and mathematics, while pupils from families with income of less than ¥2 million scored more than 10 percentage points less than the average.

A panel of experts under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology made the finding after conducting a survey on the parents of some of the elementary school pupils who took the standardized achievement exam, introduced by the ministry in 2007, revealing links between household income and the exam results for the first time.

The survey found the largest gap, as much as 23.3 percentage points, in the ability to apply basic mathematical knowledge.

The percentage of questions answered correctly by students with a family income of less than ¥2 million stood at 42.6 percent, while those with a family income of between ¥12 million and ¥15 million got 65.9 percent of the questions right. The national average was 55.8 percent.

Sixth-graders whose parents spend more than ¥50,000 a month on education other than school had 71.2 percent of the math questions right, compared with 44.4 percent among those whose parents spend none.

The panel concluded that the difference was a result of the income gap, saying the more parents earn, the more they spend on child education, particularly cram schools.

Hiroaki Mimizuka, a professor specializing in educational sociology at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo and a member of the panel, said the results point to the possibility that providing monetary assistance for education could improve students' abilities.

Cambodia's literacy rate among youngsters reaches 84.7%

PHNOM PENH, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia's literacy rate among people aged 15-24 has reached 84.7 percent after years of efforts by the government, khmer newspaper reported on Thursday.

"If we consider 15 years old upwards, it has 73.6 percent of literate people. However, among this figure, there are still 26.4 percent of illiterate population, " the Kampuchea Thmei quoted Phon Hon Sin, director of informal education system of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, as saying.

And among the illiterate people, 60 percent of them are women. "Each year we helped 55,000 people to eliminate illiteracy," he said.

"The most of illiterate women have abandoned their education since the beginning of primary. Their dropout rate from primary and secondary schools is about 10 percent across the country and at the higher education, the women enrollment rate is so low and it has about 30 percent only," he said, adding that poverty is mainly the reason why they abandon education.

"Education sectors of the government opened 1,000 literacy classes and another 1,000 literacy classes were set up by organizations with supports from partners," he said.