The Japanese cell phone market is hard to crack for western telecommunication companies. That’s something that also Nokia, the biggest mobile carrier in the world, had to experience and finally pull out of Japan completely in late November 2008.

Japan is the most advanced mobile phone market in the world and the Japanese customers are used to be provided with the latest technology handsets and innovative content on a regular basis. Functionality and usability are on the highest level and every season Japanese can choose out of a huge range of newly designed phones, fulfilling all needs of very specific user groups. The times are long gone when cell phones where mainly communication devices. Most Japanese rarely even use their mobile phones for calling.

Japanese “Keitai” (cell phone) are every day lifestyle items that represent the user’s personality. Japanese literally live with their mobile phones. They wake up in the morning by their phone’s timer, pay their bus or train ticket to school or work with their phone, write SNS and blogs in the train, watch TV in their break times, pay for their lunches or do mobile shopping. On the way home they play mobile games, download music or videos, read the news or surf the mobile internet. Many Japanese even sleep with their phones in their hands.

Japanese have a high brand awareness and interest in quality design and lifestyle products from overseas. Exactly these factors made Apple’s iPod a top seller in Japan. When in July 2008 the iPhone finally arrived to Japan, people build long lines and waited for days in front of the Softbank shops, just to be one of the first to posses an iPhone. In spite of high handset and data plan prices, sales were good for some weeks and people rumored that the iPhone could make it in the Japanese market. Also there is no offical data available, it is said that Softbank sold about 400.000 iPhones in the first 3 weeks. But then, after just some weeks the euphoria was gone and therefore the sales went low. Very low!

The iPhone lacked too much of the standard features of Japanese phones. Beginning with the hardware, the iPhone’s camera has only 2 mega pixels, doesn’t have auto focus and macro functionality, necessary for QR code scanning and the positioning of the camera makes it difficult to make pictures of yourself. Also the screen resolution is way behind the time in Japan, battery life is low and movies can’t be taken. Also incompatibility with flash, which is preinstalled on 90% of Japanese phones (flashlite), the lack of applications in Japanese language, no Emoji (emoticons) support and the missing copy & paste function didn’t appeal to the Japanese customer. Besides false marketing, rumors about broken handsets, guarantee issues and bad service took the rest to make Japanese think the iPhone is no use for the Japanese.

Then Softbank put a lot of effort and money in commercials, increasing the awareness of the iPhone in Japan. Firmware updates fixed some software issues and with the external 1seg adapter lacking hardware features were tried to be fixed. Also iPhone commercials are seen anywhere, nor Softbank nor Apple released any figures or information on iPhone sales in Japan. And that can’t be seen as a sign that the iPhone sells well here. Then on Feb 25th Softbank announced a new campaign called “iPhone for everybody” to increase iPhone Sales in Japan. Starting on Feb 27th, lasting till may 31st, subscribers for a new 2 years contract will get the 8gb iPhone completely for “free”. The 16gb model will be extremely reduced to one eights of the former price of 80.520yen (823$) to 11.520yen (115$). In addition Softbank reduces the prices for flat rate data plans from 5.985yen (62$) to 4.410yen (45$) per month. If this drastic price reductions doesn’t help the iPhone sell in Japan, nothing will. In economic times like these also Japanese consumers, who keep showing a high consumption rate through the long time of recession in Japan, might be finally convinced, attracted by that cheap offer and help the iPhone survive or even boost in Japan. Let’s see what the next month bring.