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iPhone 3G sales lag in Japan
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The iPhone 3G may be ubiquitous, but there's once place it's not faring so well: the Land of the Rising Sun.
Apple partnered with Japan's third-largest mobile carrier, Softbank Corp., to bring the iPhone 3G to Japan, and though the initial buzz over the summer generated large sales, demand has fallen to a third of what it was in the market initially, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Spokesmen for Apple Japan and Softbank declined to provide details on the reasons behind the drop in demand, but one possibility is that Japan is already home to some of the world's most cutting-edge technology, especially in the Mobile Internet Device market, and the new iPhone may simply be just another piece of new technology among many others, and not the life-altering device the U.S. market has deemed it.
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Comments
Posted by Luke Janssen | September 15, 2008 - 11:56am
Much has been written about who is ahead of whom in the mobile race. When we get asked this question I always just discount Japan and Korea. Many have looked to Japan for things to come, but it is wrong to do so. Look at the failure of iMode for Australia's Telstra for example.
Japanese thinking is different. Behavior is different. Many other situations are different and as a result we can't look to them and expect everything that is big there to be big elsewhere. QR codes in my opinion are another innovation that won't be big outside Japan. At least not for another 3 to 5 years.
In support of my hypothesis I offer you the Japanese toilet. Clearly Japanese toilet technology is way ahead of the world. So why hasn't it spread? Because things are different there. You can't just translate concepts from one culture to another and expect them to work, and that is that.
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