Inside out: Japan's telcos get creative in the face of ARPU declines

Currently Japanese telecom consumers can pay as little as $7 for a monthly 3GB plan from Rakuten, with even lower prices available from MVNOs, according to Marc Einstein, Research Director, Counterpoint Research.

"If you divided that by the GDP per capita, it's got to be one of the cheapest rates in the world," he says.

If that wasn't enough for Japanese telcos to contend with, low prices came about swiftly. Competition and government action have contributed to a precipitous drop in average revenues per user (ARPU) in the last couple of years, and traditional telecom operators are having to adapt quickly to new market realities.

For KDDI, NTT Docomo and Softbank this has meant developing ambitious diversification strategies, as Einstein, who is based in Japan and has been tracking the local telecoms market for well over a decade, explains in this podcast.