Japan’s largest mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) released its earnings for the nine months ending December 2008 today, which includes its third quarter results. The incumbent carrier posted a 30 percent drop in net income from October to December to 91 billion yen ($1.01 billion) compared to 130 billion ($1.45 billion) in the same period a year ago. DoCoMo’s operating profit for the third quarter declined 22 percent to 170 billion yen ($1.89 billion) from 217 billion ($2.42 billion) a year ago. Sales, meanwhile, fell 7.2 percent to 1.11 trillion yen ($12.3 billion) from last year’s 1.2 trillion yen ($13.4 billion).

Results for the nine-month period from April-December were better, with DoCoMo posting a 16 percent rise in net profit of 438 billion ($4.8 billion) yen, up from 376.5 billion yen ($4.2 billion) in the same period a year earlier. Operating income climbed 19 percent to 746.8 billion yen ($8.3 billion), on the back of 3.38 trillion yen ($37.7 billion) in sales. The company said that its ongoing strategy of cutting back on handset subsides and putting the savings toward reduced tariffs had helped the company to retain customers. For the nine month period, DoCoMo, which has been losing customers to its smaller rivals Softbank and KDDI managed to bring in more customers than it lost. The carrier added 220,000 net adds, giving it a current total of 54,155 million subscribers. Churn, which measures the number of customers defecting, improved to .44 percent from .74 percent a year ago, and .52 percent in the previous quarter.

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