Survey: The iPhone is No. 1 in Japan – Updated
Gauging the iPhone's popularity in Japan is not easy.
Just ask Brian X. Chen. He wrote a piece for Wired.com last April called Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone suggesting that despite the long lines that greeted the iPhone 3G last summer, the device was a big flop in Japan.
"Apple’s iPhone has wowed most of the globe," he wrote. "But not Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it’s being offered for free."
Chen had to issue an apology to readers and two major revisions after his piece was torn apart in AppleInsider by Daniel Eran Dilger, writing under the byline Prince McLean, for getting initial sales estimates wrong and badly misquoting a couple key sources. But neither Dilger nor Chen had a good handle on how the iPhone was actually selling.
Which is why there was some interest this week in a survey of 2,300 Japanese retail stores conducted by the market research company BCN, reported by nikkei.net and picked up Friday by the English language TG Daily.
According to this survey, cellphone sales are plummeting in Japan but sales of smartphones have grown 80% in the past year, with Apple (AAPL) clearly in the lead.
The survey listed the top 10 bestselling smartphones cellphones in Japan. Heading the list at No. 1 was the 32GB iPhone 3GS. Second in line was the 16 GB model.
According to TG Daily, Apple has sold 1 million iPhones since July 2008 through Softbank, its exclusive Japanese carrier. But take that number with a grain of salt; it sounds suspiciously like the initial sales estimate that got Brian Chen in so much trouble last April.
No. 3 in the BCN survey is the NTT DoCoMo Aquos SH-04A, designed by Sharp. Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold came in No. 6. Rounding out the top 10 list were four smartphones made by HTC.
UPDATE: On Sunday, Asiajin's Akky Akimoto published an analysis of the survey that provides more detail and context — and corrects several errors in the initial report.
The BCN ranking turns out to be a weekly top 10 list of bestselling cellphones (not just smartphones) for the June 22 to 28 — the week the iPhone 3GS went on sale in Japan — and it was the new iPhones, not the old, that were the Nos. 1 and 2 bestsellers in Japan that week. Curiously, the new iPhones also appeared on a BCN survey the week before they actually went on sale, coming in at No. 174 (32GB) and No. 189 (16GB), respectively.
You can see the original BCN list in Japanese here.
Photo courtesy of Information Architects.
First, this is not a random survey, but an actual tally of sales by a bunch of Japanese retailers, much like NPD does in the US. So it's first hand data and reliable.
Second, the iPhone 3GS 32 GB also made the #3 sport for the whole month of June, so that's certainly something.
373 million Japanese? How did they more than triple their population in such a short time? (Last time I checked — i.e., about 5 minutes ago — Japan had a estimated population of about 127 million. Between 1/3 and 1/4 of that lives in the Tokio Metropolitan Area. The areas around Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya together house more than 60 million people, which is nearly half of Japan's population.)
I'd like to further clarify Asaijin's Akky Akimoto's correction, and point out that the survey does not include the various mobile carrier's own shops, which does distort the data somewhat; the Blackberry Bold is definitely too high, as are a few other phones.
FYI, Japan does not have 373 million people. It has 120 million and most live in urban areas. Commenters needs to get their facts straight too.
I understand that many Japanese conceal their iPhones in the fad-ish YMYL Holsters, which is why you rarely see them…
let me get this straight. you quote a weekly survey on the week of the iphone launch and, *gasp*, iphone is #1. what a triumph!!! iphone is #1!!! let's all fold our tents now and go home
get a grip people. this isn't even impressive.
PED: You said, "Heading the list at No. 1 was the 168GB iPhone 3GS." 168GB iPhone?? Why do they get the better stuff? Dude, please correct your errors.
ex ped: Arrgh. Fixed. Thanks.
Of the 373 million Japanese living in Japan, only 45 millions live in cities and towns such as Tokyo, Kyoto, etc. 83% live in rural and suburban Japan. You could born and raised in Tokyo all your life and still not meet 80% of the Japanse in Japan. Try China. iPhone is only 2 years and 1 month old, and iPhone is already a giant. iPhone III is the American idol. If you are cheap, get a good text-to-speech and speech-to-text application, install it into the mighty iPhone, and live a life free of any keyboard.
Why nobody ever talks about the ugly, terrible, outdated, Buy1 Get1 Free, useless, tasteless blackberries?
"Some website X reports they read on some other site Y that some company Z’s survey says sales of… blablabla. How ridiculous.
Using a freaking survey to figure out sales?! Even more ridiculous."
True. But then you are here reading about it and commenting on it, which is the same level of ridiculous squared.
And then I am commenting on you commenting on it, which is ridiculous raised to the third power, as Umberto Eco would say.
But here's the thing: I am aware of how ridiculous I am, and I LIKE IT.
So does Phil. I think. I mean, surely?
None of us are getting any of this time back. I say you just have to laugh like hell.
Misleading headline. iPhone is NOT number one in general but in a small subcategory in Japan.
Further, I live in Japan and teach at three different universities including two of the most prestigious. Students fiddle with their cell phones before lecture (and sometimes during). I've not seen any with an iPhone.
EHK
Some website X reports they read on some other site Y that some company Z's survey says sales of… blablabla. How ridiculous.
Using a freaking survey to figure out sales?! Even more ridiculous.
"I just got back from Tokyo last week and can probably count on two hands the number of iPhones I saw (aside from my own) if that. I saw more of the usual Docomo/Softbank/KDDI clamshell or slide open offerings then anything else."
I live in Tokyo and can assure you that your anecdotal evidence is rather meaningless. I mean, I walked down the train platform yesterday when leaving work and counted 6 people with iPhones in 2 minutes. What does this prove?
There are of course some problems with the iPhone in the Japanese market. It's a bit wide and difficult to hold in one hand for women. Worse, the touch surface is virtually unusable for women with longish fingernails. This is the fashion for a lot of women here so a the iPhone cannot be used by a large and important portion of the market. Also, due to the structure of the Japanese language, SMSing with one thumb on a number style keypad is perfectly efficient. Whereas English buyers who want to SMS and email need a full size keyboard, the full keyboard (one of the important features of any smartphone for an English consumer) is truly a non-issue for a Japanese buyer. The iPhone's virtual Japanese keypad is the same layout as the keyboard on all other regular mobile phones.
This is to say that the iPhone is not ideal for every type of Japanese consumer and also there is less need in Japan for 'smartphones' because of the keyboard issue.
But that's not to suggest that the iPhone is flopping in Japan. And to suggest that would be absurd. First, everybody Japanese consumer knows what it is – and there is not likely a single other phone that can claim that. Second, it blows other phones away in terms of its OS and its software sophistication in general, its internet browsing functionality, etc. Despite many people who don't actually know claiming otherwise, the handsets in Japan are loaded with bad software and functions that people don't use and are incapable of providing any kind of real web browsing experience. Finally, as of the 3GS release, Softbank is putting a serious marketing effort into the iPhone. It has currently devoted the entire first floor of its showcase shop (in Harajuku) to the iPhones. The street level floor is wall to wall iPhones. It almost looks like an Apple store. You want a non-iPhone, you have to walk past rows of iPhones to get to the staircase and head downstairs. By comparison, when the iPhone first launched in Japan last summer, Softbank hardly promoted it. One or two sample units were put up on the shelves amidst 50 other models of various makers.
I just got back from Tokyo last week and can probably count on two hands the number of iPhones I saw (aside from my own) if that. I saw more of the usual Docomo/Softbank/KDDI clamshell or slide open offerings then anything else.
Are you trying to win a "Most misleading headline of the year" award?