MacDailyNews Take: A shout rings down the cavernous halls of the palatial MacDailyNews headquarters: “Quick, somebody get Brian X. Chen on the horn!“
Alpeyev and Eki report, “Taiwan’s HTC Corp. was the second-largest seller of smartphones in Japan with 11 percent of the market, followed by Toshiba Corp.’s 6.8 percent, Tokyo-based MM Research Institute Ltd. said in a report yesterday.”
“The MM estimates indicate Japan accounted for about 5.6 percent of iPhones sold worldwide last fiscal year,” Alpeyev and Eki report. “While the Cupertino, California-based electronics maker doesn’t break down the number iPhones sold by country, Japan’s portion of total revenue climbed to 6.6 percent in the latest quarter, the highest since 2006, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
holy shite
that market is among the fussiest group of technophiles around
futurists look to Tokyo citizens for trends in lifestyle
wait to see what Asian buyers will do with their 3G iPad, kids.
And people said they could never crack it…
But, but, the Japanese are a proud people and only buy from Japanese companies like Sony! Oh wait, they prefer quality? Who’d have guessed.
“While the Cupertino, California-based electronics maker doesn’t break down the number iPhones sold by country.”
For competition reasons, this discrete information is not reported to the public. In order to level the playing field, all companies would have to report details. Of course Apple is able, and does, report sales, margins, etc. by country to management, but not to the public. It’s just grouped together in the financial statements as allowed under generally accepted accounting principles, and for competition reasons, detailed info. is not reported to the public.
but smartphones only make up 30% of all cell phones 🙁
Assuming Apple have sold 25MM iPhones (a rough estimate) in the last year and 5.6 % iPhones were sold in Japan, then the actual # of iPhones sold in the last 12 month was ~1.5MM.
Not too shabby. I see RIMM is nowhere to be seen.
Asians really crank out their use of the iPhones. Check out AppleGirl?
How do you say “bloodbath” in Japanese?
=:~)
not a direct translation but the japanese equivalent would be ‘blood-festival’ or 血祭 (chi matsuri)
But how do you define “smartphone” in Japan? Even the dumb phones are incredibly smart. In 2005 the phone I got in Japan had two-way video chat. Tons of “dumb” phones have features that the iPhone and other US “smartphones” lack, like digital over-the-air 1-seg TV and built-in digital wallets. I really don’t think that this “smartphone” statistic means very much, although it’s great that Apple has doubled its shipments.
I thought the analysts said the iPhone would fail in Japan?
血がどんどん流れて行く。。。
Japanese users buy what is popular at the moment. They’re fickle, not picky consumers.
You just need a few famous people to brandish one and then half the country goes out to buy it.
Apple is currently associated with “cool”
Tomorrow, it could be different.
Hey! Remember that Wired article that said the Japanese hates the iPhone? This so called writer actually ruined someones career in Japan with that piece. You guys remember that?
How do you stop a juggernaut?
You don’t.
I still maintain It will never fly in Japan.
I used to get a kick out of reading stories about how they had these totally amazing phones in Japan, and the iPhone would never, ever, ever be able to compete because the Japanese were so amazingly more sophisticated.
Well, yes, they are very sophisticated in their taste for technology. You can tell by the phone they’re all buying.
Like phones from Motorola and Nokia, Japanese phones were amazingly sophisticated junk.
Probably another example how a long list of features (“sophisticated”) is meaningless if it is a pain in the ass to use them.
Nice try.
But the iPhone has been selling too well in Japan for much too long to be dismissed as a fad.
You can’t use “cool” to explain away its continuous success. “Cool” changes too quickly.
@MooLatte
And Americans are different in this respect?
@fred
It’s better to start at the top, win there and then the middle and bottom will aspire to any low-end (but still profitable) phone you offer.
If you start at the bottom, it is well nigh impossible to even think about the top end: ask Michael Dell. Toyota tried with Lexus and have still to be considered a top brand even though the cars are great: the pedigree is held against it.
That’s great, but I wonder what the definition of smartphone is in this study.
How big is the smartphone segment of the Japanese market relative to the whole mobile phone market? (Someone wrote 30% above, but that sounds wrong.)
I hope that Brian Chen has a DNR order that goes into effect after the cardiac arrest he’ll have over this…
Hey my “MDN Magic Word” is “ill” haha
Feel free to let Wired and Brian X. Chen know what you think of their 2009 article here…