Japan's NTT DoCoMo has revealed that its nine-month profit fell 11.2% to 381.9 billion yen ($3.23 billion), partly as a result of declining mobile revenues.
Operating revenue for the nine months ending in December declined 1.1% to 3.33 trillion yen. Mobile service revenue decreased by 7.2% to 2.22 trillion yen, with voice revenue shrinking 16.3% to 669.8 billion yen.
The operator blamed the contraction on the impact of penetration of a new discount program and a new billing plan.
DoCoMo added 3 million mobile subscriptions during the nine-month period, taking its total customer base up to 65.3 million. Subscribers to its Xi LTE network improved by 48.8% to 28.3 million.
Aggregate ARPU meanwhile decreased by 5.8% to 4,390 yuan, while MoU increased by one minute to 111.
Also impacting the bottom line was a 64.7 billion yen increase in operating expenses, despite the operator's attempt to cut costs by accelerating its structural reform program.
Higher smartphone revenues led to an 8.2% increase in equipment sales to 675.8 million yen.
DoCoMo ended the calendar year with 90,200 LTE base stations in operation, and has set a target of having 95,300 LTE base stations as of the end of March. More than half of these are compatible with a maximum download speed of 100Mbps or higher.
Based on its results so far, DoCoMo has forecast a total operating income of 630 billion yen for the full year. This would be an 189.2 billion yen decline from the previous fiscal year. Operating revenues are meanwhile expected to fall by 61.2 billion yen to 4.4 trillion yen.