The iPhone and Japan

Takashi Amano, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. boosted its share of the Japan mobile-phone market to more than a third after the country’s largest wireless carrier started selling the iPhone.

Apple boosted iPhone shipments in Japan to 36.6 percent of the market in the year ended March, up from 25.5 percent a year earlier, according to Tokyo-based MM Research Institute Ltd. The Cupertino, California-based smartphone maker shipped 14.43 million phones in Japan the past fiscal year, the researcher said.

Worth revisiting this vintage 2009 claim chowder: “Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone”.

Update: Worth noting that this is about total mobile phone market share, not “smartphone” market share. Mobile phone share is a much more meaningful number, because very soon all mobile phones will be smartphones. We’ll just call them “phones”. Apple’s smartphone market share has looked bad, and in many cases declined over the first half of this decade, because the rate at which all phones are becoming smartphones has grown faster than the iPhone’s share of all mobile phones. But that focus on “smartphone market share” has obscured the fact that the iPhone’s share of all mobile phones sold has grown ever since 2007.

★ Wednesday, 14 May 2014