Japan's largest mobe operator to snub Samsung this winter Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo will snub Samsung in its winter smartphone line-up after the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its summer sales targets. The firm will stock mobes from Sony, Sharp and Fujitsu in its main product line, partly in response to the S4's performance and also because the Korean electronics firm …
All we hear is that Samsung is God, Samsung can do no wrong, Samsung is so cool.
Yet apparently in Japan, they aren't so formidable.
Can someone please disprove this news otherwise Fandroida everywhere will be crying themselves to sleep.
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"All we hear is that Samsung is God, Samsung can do no wrong, Samsung is so cool. Yet apparently in Japan, they aren't so formidable."
Yeah, I mean the Japanese usually *love* Korean stuff. :-)
I remember reading a great article many moons ago about people that got really invested in the 3DFX vs. Nvidia graphics wars (I did say it was many moons), the point was users that showed brand loyalty to 3DFX only did a disservice to themselves by being loyal to one company. In this case, in 9 months when I can upgrade my phone, I'll simply pick out the best phone that fits my needs. The label on the front may hold a little sway, but not enough that Samsung will keep me as a customer if they drop the ball.
The S4 is not selling in Japan, POOR PERFORMANCE?
Finally there are people that haven't had the wool pulled over their eyes by in your face advertising. It seems the fellows from the land of the rising sun have seen through the hype and near useless features and also the doctored performance of the phone. They are true connoisseurs of electronics.
It could also be that they have been given a back hander to sell Japanese phones to help their economy, which is actually no bad thing.
Like Matt below, when I come to upgrade I will check all of the units on the market - Samsung or whatever. What *does* endear me to Samsung is at least they allow you to change the battery and insert a MicroSD card. Goodbye HTC and most of Sony's offerings. Having used a Motorola Razr i recently (good phone) I get nervous when phone is less than 50% charged and end up charging more that I used to (had a Sony Xperia Ray before). Incidentally, what is *so* wrong with the S4???? I played with both the HTC One and S4 and preferred the S4. As I always keep my phone in a case, a metal body has no bearing whatsoever. However, I still think it's too big and seriously looking at the S4 Mini. Regards
You may be joking, but given that the Sony phone that's doing better also runs Android, it's not really an issue anyway for Android fans (I'm sure plenty of Android fans are also a bit annoyed that the media focus on Samsung).
Interesting to see 1.3 million phones for the Xperia A, in just one country. By iphone fan standards, one million in 76 days worldwide was a runaway success, yet this higher success in just one country barely gets a mention... I also remember how it was mainstream news when the iphone was the best selling model in only one country, for one month, just after a new model - yet for every country and every month apart from this, I've never seen a news item.
interesting that the brands they are touting are japanese home brands (had to verify whether or not sharp/fujitsu were from japan but they are).
from a global perspective those brands seem to do poorly relative to the more obvious players.
Not saying it's a bad thing to promote your local brands.. it is nice to see someone promoting their own stuff, but it really seems like this operator was looking for any excuse to not pitch a non japanese handset.
from a WSJ blog post I just came across(which talked about NEC and Panasonic exiting the smartphone business):
"According to a report released in May from Japan’s MM Research Institute, Apple was the largest smartphone vendor by shipment in Japan for the 12 months through March with a 35.9% share, followed by Fujitsu’s 13% and Sony 12%."
So I guess their local brands do fairly well in the home market.
Having recently been to Japan I can assure you that since their exposure to western food they have grown somewhat, at 6'2" I felt a midget.
Of course the burger revolution has had some dire consequences, instead of vitamin B deficiency they are also getting rounder and suffering more heart problems. Still they have a long way to go to catch up with the Americans.
So 300,000 less than expected (70% of what was expected) is crap now is it ?
For me crap is Xbox 360 sales in the last week in Japan. (275)
I suppose Nintendo has sold more than 4 times as many copies of animal crossing as that operator has sold S4's (3,364,716 since release if I read the numbers right). That is excluding the other operators like Softbank.
A figure of 70% of target is dreadful in just about anything. When I was in B2B sales, anything less than 90% of target meant the product needed to be replaced as it either sucked or was not appropriate for a given market (for whatever reasons).
Even a shitty salesperson in a bad economic environment can hit 90% of target, assuming the product isn't fatally flawed or totally unacceptable to the market.
"mobes" is just gross, you reall should see a doctor about it, they'll soon clear that up.
We call them "keitai" and to be quite honest, the S4 is almost big enough to go surfing on. I find it too big, so I have a "galakei" (Old dumb phone, you know the kind, can go for over a day between charges, you can make phone calls and *TALK* to people with them...)
Besides, DCM0 isn't a government company, it's the other way around.
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