Cell shopping makes wallets redundant in Japan

Japanese office worker Satoshi Tada pays for shopping, wins free food and gets store discounts all by waving his cell phone.

“I use it pretty much every day,”the 25-year-old said.“You can charge money on it right there if needed, and you don’t have to run around trying to find an ATM.” The world’s top firms such as Visa Inc and Nokia are still mostly testing phone use for payments, but in Japan, more than 50 million, or about half of all cell phone users,already carry phones capable of serving as wallets.

Japan has pioneered not just the technology but also the business models that will pave the way for wallet phones to become a standard payment method in the future. Some 700 million people worldwide are expected to own such phones by 2013.

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Firing up Tech Factories

For a while, India has been the preferred offshoring destination for software and services and Chi na the manufacturing king. This neat division is beginning to blur now. Leading telcos like Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung and Ericsson have set up manufacturing plants in the last couple of years. Many of them have attracted their component suppliers to set up facilities here. Seven out of the top 10 worldwide electronics manufacturing services (EMS) players including Foxconn, Flextronics and Jabil Circuits have set up their manufacturing facilities. PC bigwigs like HP, Lenovo, Dell, Acer, HCL, Wipro and Zenith already have their assembly lines here.

Take Nokia facility in Chennai, for instance. It showcases Indian IT and electronic hardware manufacturing prowess. Nokia’s factory in Chennai is among the largest, employing 40,000 people and houses close to 10 component vendors for mobile handsets in the same park.

Nokia exports about 70% of its production, according to industry estimates. The factory has a total production base of 5 lakh cellphones per day. Story at other telecom bigwigs like Motorola, LG, Samsung and Ericsson is not very different.

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