Impenetrable Market
Samsung Electronics's smartphones have been struggling in the Japanese market, so the company has given the go-ahead for its strategy to expand its market share in the Japanese market. SoftBank, one of the top three mobile carriers in Japan, decided to resume sales of Samsung smartphones after four and a half years.
According to TV Tokyo and IT industry sources on May 12, Japan’s third largest mobile operator SoftBank will start selling Samsung Electronics’ latest smartphones, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, as early as next week.
The Galaxy S6 series has been released in the Japanese market through Japan’s largest and second-largest mobile carriers NTT DoCoMo and KDDI from April 23. Once SoftBank, which has 37.4 million subscribers, also begins the sale of its smartphones, Samsung Electronics will be able to sell the Galaxy S6 to the subscribers of all the top three mobile operators in Japan.
SoftBank is considered to be “Apple's Missionary” in Japan. When the iPhone was first released in Japan in 2007, Steve Jobs granted the exclusive sales rights to late starter SoftBank instead of the two top mobile carriers at the time, NTT and KDDI.
Since then, the launch of the iPhone expanded to all mobile operators in Japan. However, Apple and SoftBank maintain a close cooperative relationship to the extent that half of the iPhones being sold in Japan are still distributed through SoftBank.
Considering this fact, it is a very meaningful change that SoftBank releases the products of Samsung Electronics, the biggest competitor of Apple.
From the end of last year, SoftBank has made a change in its sales strategy. The company launched Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Tab 4 in December last year. In the meantime, SoftBank sold only Apple’s iPad for a tablet product.
An official from the industry said, “With its competitors NTT DoCoMo and KDDI both selling the iPhone and the Galaxy, SoftBank has chosen utility in a bid to prevent its customer loss and lower its dependence on Apple. The company seems to expand Samsung smartphone products offered with the sale of the Galaxy S6, following its tablet.”
Currently, the name “Samsung” is hardly seen on mobile device sales rankings in Japan. According to market research firm IDC Japan, Apple dominated the Japanese smartphone market with a 58.7 percent market share last year in terms of shipments, and the figure increased by 12.8 percentage points from a year earlier. Samsung Electronics ranked 4th with a 4.7 percent market share by a large margin with leading companies, following Sony with 14.2 percent and Sharp with 11.4 percent.
With the cooperation of SoftBank, Samsung Electronics plans to focus on customized marketing for localization in Japan. Last month, the company placed a DoCoMo logo on its Galaxy S6 series, which were sold by NTT DoCoMo, instead of a Samsung logo. This decision reflects the high loyalty of Japanese customers to domestic products. For its previous Galaxy S5, Samsung placed the DoCoMo logo on the front and the Samsung logo on the back. However, the company removed its own corporate logo this time in a more drastic measure to appeal to local consumers.