Cumulative shipments of handsets that can receive so-called 1Seg digital TV broadcasts totaled 11.7 mln units at the end of July according to the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association. Overall unit shipments climbed 54.6 pct in July from a year before to 5,348,000 units, surpassing five million for the second straight month.
Gartner is reporting that worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users in the second quarter of 2007 reached 270.9 million units, a 17.4 per cent increase from the same period last year. In Japan, sales to end users in the second quarter of 2007 were 12.1 million units, an increase of 10.3 per cent from the second quarter of 2006 but a decline of 17.5 percent from the first quarter of 2007.
According to a recent report, Japan’s mobile content marketplace in 2006 was worth some ¥928.5 billion, (approx. $800 million) posting an increase of 129% year-on-year. Noted by category the mobile content market, transactions for fee-based content, comprised ¥366.1 billion, marking an increase of 116% over 2005. Mobile commerce — including hard goods, services, and transactions — made up ¥562.4 billion, an increase of 138% over final results for fiscal 2005.
The genesis of today’s Viewpoint was back in March, when we spotted this op-ed referring to Japan mobile that had stated: “What’s different about the Japanese mobile market is that innovation is moving toward business models and marketing tactics instead of technical features and functions.” That op-ed piece in turn cited a new research report on eMarketer, “Japan: Marketing to a Mobile Society,” which insisted: “What stands out in the current Japanese experience is the fact that the center of gravity for getting through to Japanese mobile users has shifted in favor of business models and marketing tactics as opposed to new technical features and mobile phone functions.”
We took exception to both these as serious mis-analyses of the cornerstone role that technological innovation and network infrastructure competition have played – and continue to play – in powering Japan’s mobile success story. After contact with the eMarketer editors, we agreed to write separate opinion pieces, which we would both republish side-by-side in our newsletters, as an excellent way to hash out the topic and let you – our collective readers – decide.
Sadly, the marketing guys at eMarketer quashed the idea, as the subject and the detailed discussion would be “too technical a topic for our [eMarketer’s] newsletter.” But we know that WWJ readers are more than smart enough to figure out for themselves what’s really driving the mobile Internet in Japan! So we wished the eMarketer editors best of luck in the future, again gave thanks that WWJ doesn’t have any meddling marketing guys, and herewith present to you our Viewpoint.
(Subscribers login to access the full article by WWJ editor Daniel Scuka)
Image: Holographic projection demo at NTT DoCoMo R&D Labs, November 2006 ©Mobikyo
The CIAJ has released their annual report on cellular phone trends in Japan. This year’s study focuses on market trends in handset replacement purchases since the launch of number portability (MNP), the uses of 3G handsets, changes in viewing trends of one-segment digital tv broadcasts with the abundant availability of compatible handsets and interest in other functions, such as m-commerce.
NHK and Index have announced their intent to develop a video search application dedicated for digital tv on mobile phones. Yomu.TV effectively uses title text in the broadcast captioning as meta data to access programs by the keyword and will apparently even offer specific scene retrieval. Index will take charge of the technical intelligence concerning the cellphone design development while NHK is responsible for the applications core design and production.
