Apple iPhone becomes #1 selling cellphone – of any kind – in Japan

“Apple now has the top-selling cellphone of any kind in Japan, IDC Japan determined late Thursday,” Electronista reports.

“The iPhone 4S launch helped Apple claim 26.6 percent of all cellphone shipments in the country this fall,” Electronista reports. “It may have been the first non-Japanese company to top local ranks, ending a longstanding emphasis on local makers.”

Electronista reports, “The Fujitsu-Toshiba alliance was next closest at 18.3 percent courtesy of its Arrows smartphones, while Sharp (15.7 percent), Kyocera (9.8), and Panasonic (8.8) were next. Year-long, the spike was enough to give Apple 14.2 percent of the country’s cellphone sales. Sharp (20.1 percent) and Fujitsu-Toshiba (18.8 percent) were still larger, but it did see Apple eclipse Panasonic (10 percent) and Kyocera (9.7 percent).”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: 血風呂!

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jax44” for the heads up.]

29 Comments

    1. No physical keypad, no TV, no eWallet, no place to affix a Ms. Kitty strap. Instant fail in Japan. They’ll never sell more than a couple of iPhones in Japan. All Japanese feature phones are far better than an iPhone. Circa 2008

      Never try to predict the future when it comes to Apple products.

  1. Just to be clear, the original article from the Japanese site says “shipments”… a good friend of mine who works closely with Softbank and knows their CEO personally has told me they basically have to give the iPhone away – I argue with him about it constantly. Regardless, the numbers are very impressive 🙂

  2. Poor Brian X Chen.

    Look, I’m not going to pretend I knew that in 1997, The new Apple under Jobs was going to become a global empire. No one knew that. Those that said they did are liars. All I wanted was for Apple to make great products again. Which they did. Changing the world? That was a bonus.

    But by 2007, it was painfully clear that the Apple of the late 80s/90s was completely swept away. The iMac, iPod and iTunes had changed indurstries. Apple was flush with cash and selling millions of units a quarter.

    So when the iPhone debuted, and the same people who told us that the iPod was going to be irrelevant any day now explained to us in no uncertain terms how much of a failure the iPhone was going to be… Well, I knew that someday I would be looking back on those strident predictions and gleefully running it in the faces of those prognosticators without a hint of humility.

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