Missed Call: How the iPhone Conquered Japan Japan's once-mighty electronics

JEK

Senior Insider
Missed Call: How the iPhone Conquered Japan
Japan's once-mighty electronics giants have missed the smartphone wave and now struggle as Apple and Samsung's devices overtake digital cameras and game machines


Japan's Dimwitted Smartphones
 
Not sure what tha writer's agenda is.. While Apple has got a nice market in Japan, it's still quite healthy, competitive market.

NTT docomo, which doesn't sell iPhone, has 60.5+ million customers while au (KDDI) has 35.7 million and Softbank 29.9 million.

The 2011 figures show plenty of market outside of Samsung and Apple; http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/09/apple.gets.absolute.lead.in.japan.phones/

And what the market leader sells today, again quite a nice set of phones:
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/product/with/index.html
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/product/next/index.html

After all we're talking about one of the world's most advanced mobile markets here with plenty of de-facto services, NFC payment systems widely deployed, and a market that is somewhat weird in what it wants.

From au's and Softbank's perspective iPhone was a god given as they didn't have the muscle of NTT originally. NTT has had a very different model how they operate, they tell the manufacturers what the phones need to do and the manufacturers deliver. The manufacturers try to differentiate by doing something better.

One could actually say that if one ignores South Korea, Japan is one of the few places where the customers have really healthy choice of very advanced phones and people are not fixated with the iPhone.
 
Ah, quite a mixture of brain burp the three articles :)

Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba alone make 260 billion USD in revenue. Just like the South Koreans, the Sony or Panasonic or Samsung TV we see is just a small fraction of their business. The iProducts wouldn't exist without these companies.

The core though is true, the Japanese at international level are failing to consumerize their intelligence. A bit like the dutch Philips, a lot of great innovation but the only Philips product you want to buy are the electric razors.

But the article series also falls to the english world trap. The moment you leave the english speaking world, or just the US in some cases, devices like Amazon Kindle disappear. Same applies for the services, instead of Netflix there's something local, typically bundled with the local broadband offerings. iTunes and iPod are yesterday compared to services like Spotify.

The trap works other direction, too. If you make a great product or service that the japanese, chinese or some other big-enough local market loves, the product may not be that exportable to the english speaking market.

But true, Apple _AND_ Samsung have been the winners over the last years.
 
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