NTT DoCoMo Inc. on Friday posted a net profit of ¥164.2 billion for the April-June quarter, 3.5 percent better than the same period last year, and ¥1.07 trillion in sales, up 2.4 percent.
Operating profit stood at ¥262.6 billion, down 1.9 percent, due to increased operating costs, such as the launch of a mobile broadcast service and reinforcing various cloud-based services.
"This is a good first quarter result to achieve our goal to earn ¥900 billion (annual operating) profit," DoCoMo President Kaoru Kato told a news conference in Tokyo.
With the number of smartphones in use on the rise, DoCoMo's revenue from its Internet connection service grew by ¥39.9 billion.
It sold 5.17 million cellphones and other devices, including 2.49 million smartphones, a jump of 92 percent.
But Japan's biggest mobile carrier is seeing a slowdown in the net increase of subscribers.
DoCoMo's list of customers grew in the quarter by 266,000, far fewer than the 405,000 increase it had in the same period last year.
KDDI Corp., the second-largest carrier, saw a 560,000 increase in April-June. Softbank Corp. saw a net increase of 750,000.
DoCoMo said about 130,000 users who bought prepaid sim cards for Sony's PlayStation Vita handheld game console did not update their contracts, which pushed down the net increase of subscribers.
During his news conference Friday, Kato apologized for an Internet connection glitch this week that allowed some DoCoMo smartphone users to change other users' settings.
Due to the technical trouble, they were able to change the passwords and registered email address of other users from 1:41 a.m. to 9:14 a.m. Wednesday at the settings website for DoCoMo's SP mode services for smartphone users.
About 1,000 users changed the password or email address of other users during that period, according to DoCoMo.