Apple partnered with Softbank and KDDI to pull more than 40,000 subscribers from DoCoMo, Japan's largest service provider.
The two carriers also gained hundreds of thousands of customers due to excitement around the iPhone 5, which was released at the same time as in the United States and Canada. By the end of the fourth quarter, the iPhone (16 percent) had surpassed Sharp and Fujitsu, each with 14 percent market share, as the top mobile vendor in the region.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has mentioned several times that Japan and other Asian Pacific (APAC) regions would be key markets, Couterpoint Research points out, but Japan has always been a difficult market to break into. It has its own digital cellular activity, and years ago was so far ahead of the rest of the world that penetrating the market seemed impossible for most foreign brands.
As recently as 2009, Japan suffered from an effect called Galápagos syndrome, in which its technology developed isolated from the rest of the world, and diverged so much that it became unusable anywhere else, despite the diversity and advancement of its technology. Cellphone creators in Japan gave mobiles email capability in 1999, cameras in 2000, third-generation networks in 2001, music downloads in 2002, electronic payments in 2004 and digital TV in 2005, the NY Times reports, and the quick growth of technology domestically gave Japanese cellphone makers little incentive to penetrate foreign markets.
Japanese citizens have long used their phones rather than PCs to access the Internet, and just about everyone owned a cellphone with advanced capabilities, which they could obtain easily and cheaply. The level of Japanese cellphone technology was a source of wonder and envy for anyone with Internet access, who could see reports of the advanced features Japanese users enjoyed. But that was before smartphones, and a few years in technology might as well be a century. The world has moved on, other brands compete in an international market while Japanese manufacturers such as NEC and Sharp have failed to penetrate globally.
In 2012, foreign brands such as Samsung and LG increased their market shares so much that Japan is no longer considered a Galápagos Island (though this probably was not the desired result when they tried to remedy the situation three years ago). The Korean brands, and even Huawei, HTC and Nokia among others, have carved a space in the Japanese market. This represents a shift away from the formerly dominant "smart feature phones" (or "low-end smartphones") with in-house OSes, helped along by Softbank and KDDI aggressively marketing the iPhone. DoCoMo responded by pushing Android phones, and their combined efforts brought the Japanese market to 50 percent foreign-owned companies.
Previous efforts by Nokia and Motorola to break into the Japanese market failed, but today, Japan has seven Apple stores, the last of which opened last year, and more are likely to come.
