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Japanese Smartphone Market: Emerging Opportunities
ROA Holdings, June 2007, Pages: 51
Japanese Smartphone Market - Emerging Opportunities report analyzes the smartphone market in Japan. The report provides a definition of smartphone, examines current trends and strategies among the Japanese operators, and analyzes the main operating systems (OS) with a focus on version characteristics and development trends. In addition, the report presents opportunities and barriers to the future growth of the Japanese smartphone market.
Executive Summary
In December 2006, Willcom, a Japanese operator, introduced W-ZERO3 series smartphones. In 2006, NTT DoCoMo and SoftBank started to introduce Windows Mobile-powered smartphones
supplied from HTC, a Taiwan-based device manufacturer. HTC established its branch in Japan in April, 2006 and now seems to get ready to expand its presence in Japan. In addition, Nokia is trying to strengthen its smartphone business in Japan by supplying Symbian S60-powered E and N series to SoftBank. NTT DoCoMo started providing BlackBerry devices and services in September 2006, which are popular among European and U.S. businessmen.
Meanwhile, mobile handset functions are becoming more diversified and advanced; therefore a need for high-performance operating systems (OS) is increasing. Shortened handset purchase cycles and reduced selling prices are stimulating the expansion of those OSs. In addition, a smartphone equipped with messaging and office applications that are comparable to the personal computers is attracting attentions in the Japanese business market which is expanding with the introduction of Mobile Number Portability (MNP).
In this report, the smartphone is defined as two types; smartphone in a broad sense and in a narrow sense. The smartphone in a broad sense refers to a device that provides more PDA-like functions than the existing handsets, regardless of the type of operating system (OS). But in a narrow sense, smartphone refers to a device that is equipped with Symbian UIQ, Nokia S60/S80, Windows Mobile, Palm, Linux OS and BlackBerry. This report focuses mainly on smartphones in the narrow sense. NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP devices with sales reaching to 20 million fall into the category of broad-sense smartphones, therefore those are not included in this report.
The Japanese smartphone market size is estimated to have grown to about 600,000 in 2006 from about 100,000 in 2005 thanks to the expansion of the business market and increase in models. To forecast the smartphone market beyond 2007, early-state Japanese notebook PC and mobile handset markets in the mid-1990s were analyzed; the smartphone market was compared with notebook PCs and handset markets to extract relations between them. The economic aspect was also considered. The results show that the market size is expected to grow every year by 78.6% (on the average) to reach 6 million units, occupying 13% of the total mobile handset market.
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