iPhone nabs 46 percent of Japanese smartphone market, the tiny Japanese smartphone market
By Donald Melanson 
posted December 18th 2009 12:36PM
posted December 18th 2009 12:36PM
So you read a headline like "iPhone grabs 46 percent of the Japanese smartphone market" and the first thing you're likely to think is, "wow, Apple is really doing well for itself." Well, it is and it isn't. While it has made some considerable gains in the smartphone market at the expense of phones like Sharp's W-ZERO3 and the Willcom 03, it still hasn't gained nearly the same total mindshare or market share that it has over here. That's because "smartphones" as we know them are still a relatively small market in Japan, where carriers' lineups consist of a whole range of offerings including everything from mobile TV-equipped phones to true camera phones to perfume holders. For a bit more context, check out the pie chart after the break courtesy of IDC Japan, which shows cellphone vendors' market share in Japan as of October of this year. The leaders by a wide margin are Sharp, Panasonic, Fujitsu and NEC with a combined 72.8% of the market, while Apple is lumped in with "Others," which add up to 22.6%. It's making inroads, to be sure, but just that at the moment.
I got all excited when I read the headline....only to later be disappointed.
@Steve Jobs
Steve, if you're coming to Engadget for your market reports you need to have a talk with your employees in Product Strategy :).
@Bill Gates
Actually no - His allmighty iPod can take video, but not images. god forbid ppl realize how crap quality that camera resolution is!
@Steve Jobs @Bill Gates
Fancy meeting you guys here...
@Phen Oddly enough, you can actually capture facial expressions and reactions with video.
@Jon Rubinsteine
Yeah I read Engadget all the time.
I'm not sure what Bill is doing here, although I'm glad to see they have internet in some retirement homes. Zing!
Oh yeah and about the whole disabling Palm Pre's iTunes syncing thing.....no hard feelings okay?
@Steve Jobs
Steve, I've been trying to reach you by phone all morning and you're posting on Engadget? I need to talk with you before the meeting with the guys from Taiwan about the you-know-what.
o_O
@Phil Schiller
You've been trying to reach me by phone huh?
I just took out my iPhone and realized the battery is dead. LOL and it's not even noon yet!
Just walk up to my office. We can have the meeting here. I've got some new ideas that are incredible, amazing, and awesome.
@Bill Gates
"Yeah I'm retired, just like your style in clothing."
Haha touché.
And as for Palm....it's only a matter of time now.
+ infinite
for the best thread ever on engadget
@Bill Gates
I just like living live on the edge, you know, spelling my name with an e, hacking itunes..
It's the sorta guy I am.
Just wondering, what will I get Steve for christmas.. I was thinking a $20 itunes gift voucher (we're a teeeny bit strapped for cash at the minute)?
@Phil Schiller
Schiller, Shillster, The Schill man..
What say you pop over to Palm hq.. and we talk about you joining us?
Surley you have to be bored with marketing easy to sell things.. we've got a challange for you, we need you to make "Pixi" sound manly.
Oh, and we're thinking as a sequel to the Pre advert, we were going to turn this whole thing on its head, by totally re-shooting it... but with Willem Dafoe in a dress in the field instead
This thread is hilarious!
@Steve Jobs @Bill Gates @Jon Rubinsteine
Bravo gentleman for making my engadget experience enjoyable again, bravo.
All hail the thread of WIN!
@Jon Rubinsteine
Jon, I gotta say, I love you man, I really do (in a totally platonic way) but I'm needed right here right now. We're about to launch this, uh... Well, I can't say anything right now but I do need to go convince Steve to stop posting in a flamewar thread over at TUAW. Seriously, he gets way too into these things.
Hey whats goin' on in here?
I heard you guys like cults!
@Steve Jobs
If you make a nice hole at the bottom on the iPhone for mobile phone charms it would skyrocket in Japan.
Sure is meta in here...
@Steve Jobs
i cant take a screen shot of this whole post....=/
(clicks on link and starts to read).............i fell asleep what happen??
@(Unverified)
I don't hate Apple just their insanely annoying fan club.
I bet Apple will put perfume in the 4G iPhone and then claim they invented the idea.
@(Unverified)
Wasn't your statement just hilarious. How long did it take you to come up with that?
@Ezye1313 Apparently decades. I ended up using a Higgs boson transmitter to send back the message so that I could be completely non-witty in this time era. Ironically, apparently I used an Apple branded transmitter in the far future too.
@(Unverified) In the future, did you (or will you?) have to jailbreak the transmitter in order for it to work to its full potential?
@(Unverified)
Hai Karate
@Accidental
yes, if you dont then all it winds up doing is redirecting you to an @mac.com webmail log in to get the messages.
@(Unverified)
Never listen to Haters, never listen to Fanboys.
Simples.
@(Unverified)
In the grand scheme of things its not doing amazingly well - just like other smartphones.
So whats a pecent anyways?
I really doubt those figures - the Japanese think the iPhone is a toy compared to their own phones - I've been to Tokyo 3 times in the past year, and have yet to see an iPhone being used by anyone. If it is true it's awesome news.
@Don Corleone
These feature phones the Japanese love are actually very limited compared to a modern multi-purpose SmartPhone platform like iPhone or Android but the features they do have must be pretty important to the Japanese. I also think the Japanese have a major bias towards native electronic products still.
@(Unverified)
Lots of Japanes mobiles have TV tuners and the chip (i forget what it's called) that lets them purchase subway tokens and vending machine items from their phones.
of course, the iPhone has neither
@Don Corleone
"I really doubt those figures - the Japanese think the iPhone is a toy compared to their own phones - I've been to Tokyo 3 times in the past year, and have yet to see an iPhone being used by anyone..."
Really? that has to be the biggest lie I've seen in this article. I just came back from Japan and I saw people with iPhones everywhere I went. Specially anywhere on the JR and specially in Akihabara district. What JR lines did you take?
@Don Corleone It's even worse outside of Tokyo. I went to Osaka and Kobe in October. I never saw a single iPhone that wasn't a display model. Everyone was using a Japanese phone. Even me (I bought one before I left; it's much more fun to use than the iPhone, not to mention the hardware feature set is better).
@HighestRanked
After a heavy campaign that required giving away Apple's flagship mobile for free? Way to kill you own argument, sir.
Japanese phones can do almost everything your computer can do.
They are highly portable.
They can watch TVs without a dongle.
They can access bank accounts.
They can link to commuter prepaid debit services (Suica, etc).
What does the iPhone have that is better? Design? Locked into the Apple ecosystem? It's a easy sell here in the States because your phones totally suck. Even my laptop, being a first-generation UMPC, can watch Japanese mobile TVs without a dongle.
Most Japanese phones are considered as an utility. The iPhone is considered as a gadget. Which one do you think people are going to use for their daily lives?
Simple answer: unless the iPhone can do everything the Japanese phones can, it will stay as a bit player, guaranteed.
As Toshiba is 4.6% you can deduct that apples share is under 4.6%.
I'm quite surprised to hear that Japan (out of all places) has a "tiny" smartphone market.
@Hydraulics Japanese average phones are already much smarter than some western "smartphones" - since the late 90's.
@Verythrax
Kind of. They're feature phones. Most of them just have a couple advanced features tacked on top of a dumb phone platform. I think the Japanese market will move to multi-purpose SmartPhones quickly once these platforms are able to cover the functionality they have today with their feature phones. Right now they have to give up something to get a good SmartPhone. As soon as someone releases a SmartPhone with the features they want it will be huge. I'm guessing Android will end up being the platform of choice in Japan because Apple's one-model-for-the-entire-world strategy just isn't going to meet the nichey needs of the Japanese consumers.
@Hydraulics
I'm not sure exactly how smartphone is defined here, at least 90% of the phones there look like slightly longer, boxy razrs, but from what I have seen there are very powerful and have a lot of installable applications. You also have to consider that any smart phone with an English keyboard is going to be almost useless to the Japanese. I still have yet to figure how they text so fast with so few keys.
@(Unverified) I really don't think that Japan will go to a smartphone orientation anytime soon. They are a HEAVY consumption society. Almost everyone can afford to have the best digital camera, top-line notebook, etc. No need to get a phone with jack-of-all-trades half-assed implementations.
And keep in mind that people carrying notebooks/netbooks is a much more common sight. And most of people prefer the keyboards for their unique messaging system.
@Verythrax Japan has been utilizing their keitais for texting/messaging far more heavily with far more features and for far many more years than the US. To that extent, 2-way video phone implementations are and old story there as many other features we consider advanced here because we're only seeing them for the 1st time.
The problem is that the keitai units sold by NTT, KDDI, SoftBank etc is that they follow the Verizon model where the carrier itself heavily dictates what goes on the phone. Consequently phones are heavily menu-driven, over-engineered, over-complicated things. The features are static, models come with X number of features and none can be added.
Thankfully Apple engineered the iPhone as a feature-rich, highly customizable with apps and user-friendly device. The consumer market in Japan always prefers high quality products and the high rate adoption of the iPhone demonstrates its superiority over the local smart phone varieties.
@HighestRanked
LOL
Are you serious?
@HighestRanked
"Thankfully Apple engineered the iPhone as a feature-rich, highly customizable with apps and user-friendly device."
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. Lol iPhone customizable and feature-rich?
@Celeras
What do you think?
I'd mod him/her up for being hilarious if Engadget had such a function.
@Celeras Absolutely serious and absolutely no trolling.
While many 'tards walk around believing customizing a phone is about changing skins, the iPhone is highly customizable to the specific needs of the user via the 100K apps available at the App Store. This provides a very high added value to owning an iPhone.
As apps mature and devs gain more experience utilizing the iPhone OS SDK's advanced API frameworks, the quality is only going to get better and better from here on and continue providing better value for customers.
In fact, as Engadget posted in a previous article, that the market preference for the iPhone has shot it way past all WinMo phones combined State-side, 250% to 300% growth in France and Australia and 150% over all world wide, is a testament to how much customers find value in owning an iPhone.
@HighestRanked
I'm actually finding myself agreeing with your post in this one...but the main thing you need to realize...
Yes they are owning the smartphone market...but the smartphone market is basically nothing in Japan. So as someone said...it makes them basically a successful failure (which isn't relegated to just iPhone but all smartphones, so it's not a bash).
But where I agree with you at is where this could cause it to tip. By having the abilities within the iPhone thru apps...this could cause the Japanese to lean towards the smartphone market and push it up. But it won't be happening anytime soon.
It's nice that Apple has finally taken over a smartphone market somewhere in the world...just too bad it's in Japan, lol.