New CIAJ nation-wide all ages survey of current smart vs. feature phone ownership & future purchase intentions: http://bit.ly/MGqumt
The handset upgrade cycle, which missed a jump, is most certainly now in Full Motion [Eds]
CIAJ Releases Report on the Study of Cellular Phone Use [Jpn]
This report is focused on the rapid spread of smartphones and reveals the growing penetration of smartphones in the mobile internet market. CIAJ mailed questionnaires to 1200 cellular phones users (100 male & 100 female users in each of the following age groups: under 20, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties) residing in the larger Tokyo and Osaka metropolitan areas from the end of March through early April of this year.
The 1,200 people surveyed owned a total of 1,463 terminals and their breakdown is listed in the following table. 697 respondents (58.1%) said their main-use terminal (primary choice terminal) was a feature-phone, while 456 respondents (38.0%) said it was a smartphone.
There was a 24 point (approximately 2.6 fold) increase in the 2012 number of smartphone users over 2011, which was also a significant increase over the growth recorded in 2011 over 2010. This indicates the continuing acceleration of smartphone popularity in Japan.
Three out of four respondents (74.9%) said they intended to purchase replacement handsets. This is an 8.7 point increase over the previous year, and though it has shrunk from last year’s growth of 31 points, it still indicates continued demand for handsets.
92.6% of respondents who indicated intention to purchase a replacement expressed intent to purchase a smartphone as their next device. This is approximately a 26 point surge over the 2011 results. It can be presumed from these figures that the shift to smartphones will continue. However, despite the strong interest in smartphones, of the respondents who indicated intention to purchase a smartphone, 21.8% did not have a specific timeline in mind. This trend will require further monitoring over the next few years, since it can be assumed that these respondents are in a wait-and-see mode.
The 2012 Study added new and more precise choices for answers to questions concerning decisive factors in purchasing a new handset, which impacted the ranking of the top responses. In addition, the popularity of smartphones seems to have influenced the outcome – for example, the ranking of the devices’ design has gone down presumably because it is more difficult to differentiate smartphone designs, while the importance of monthly charges has increased with greater use of data traffic.
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