July 3 (Bloomberg) -- NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest mobile-phone operator, will be flexible in negotiations with Apple Inc. to offer the iPhone, President Ryuji Yamada said.

``It's common sense that Apple wants to sell as many iPhones worldwide as possible and to customize it would be difficult,'' Yamada, who took over as president last month, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Tokyo today. ``Our stance on the iPhone remains flexible,'' he said, without elaborating.

Yamada, 58, faces a shrinking market share for DoCoMo, whose lineup of mobile phones and services offers little distinction from that of Softbank Corp. and KDDI Corp. DoCoMo, which includes its trademark i-mode Web-browsing software in all handsets, lost out to Softbank for the right to sell the iPhone from July 11.

``Adding the i-mode function would mean more time spent on development,'' Kenji Nishimura, a Tokyo-based analyst at Deutsche Bank AG, who has a ``hold'' rating on DoCoMo, said in an interview yesterday. The Tokyo-based company's introduction of the iPhone ``is a matter of timing,'' he said.

Softbank may sell about 1 million of the handsets in six months to a year, according to Nishimura.

DoCoMo, which has been in discussions with Apple to offer the iPhone, ``hasn't given up yet,'' Yamada said June 23.

Shares of DoCoMo rose 1.9 percent to close at 164,000 yen. The stock has fallen 12 percent on the Tokyo Stock Exchange this year, adding to a 1.1 percent decline last year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Pavel Alpeyev in Tokyo at palpeyev@bloomberg.net; Junko Kikkawa in Tokyo at jkikkawa@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 3, 2008 02:53 EDT