Mr. Horisaki

I'd like to say a word for closing the year of 2002 and celebrating the new year.

2002 was the year of great progress for the PHS industries and the global PHS subscribers are supposed to exceed 20 million in total.

In China, PHS has already been operated in nearly 300 medium and small cities and still expanding rapidly. Further market expansion is expected as well. In Taiwan, as the GSM market is actually matured, PHS subscribers are growing mainly among the younger age group due to its higher performance than the GSM and attractive content service supported by its high speed data transmission capability. In Thailand, in addition to the existing public service, its application to the large scale FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) service has been decided and the system is now being under construction. In Japan, PHS has drew public attention to its high speed wireless data transmission with 128 kbps packet service, and furthermore, the network lease by MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) is also becoming more popular. In those services, the flat-rate network usage is very popular among the users. In India, PHS trial as limited mobile service was successfully held to take the first step into this huge potential market.

Further penetration and development of PHS in Asian area have become much more promising because the PHS public services are about to start in Viet Nam, Indonesia, etc. PHS is indeed the third mobile communication system next to the GSM and CDMA.

Above mentioned facts clearly showed that the PHS's low investment cost for easy recovery, flexibility for service area expansion have widely been recognized.

The technical standard for the Advanced PHS which has 1 Mbps high speed data transmission capability has been standardized as RCR STD-28 Ver.4 by the Japanese standardization body ARIB (Association of Radio Industries and Businesses) in March 2002 and the prospects for the future will become more certain.

I'm deeply grateful to all PHS MoU Group members and to all whom involved in the PHS industries for your activities for the PHS development. Your further cooperation and support would be very much appreciated and I hope that the coming 2003 would also be the year of progress for the PHS industries.