What you need to know
- New figures show Apple dominates the smartphone market in Japan.
- IDC reckons that Apple has a 52.6% market share, with shipments up 13.8% YoY.
A new report says the iPhone 12 helped Apple snag more than 50% of the smartphone market in Japan in Q4 of 2020.
From new IDC research:
In the fourth quarter of 2020, total shipments of mobile phones in the domestic market increased 10.6% year-on-year to 11.432 million units. The reason for this increase is that Apple's shipments, mainly new models compatible with 5G, increased by 13.8% year-on-year to 6.015 million units, and many Android products also shipped in the middle to low price range. As a result, the number of units increased by 6.5% from the same period of the previous year to 5,286,000 units.
According to the figures, Apple was the top vendor with a 52.6% share, followed by Sharp (12.4%), Kyocera (7.0%), and Samsung (6.8%).
Over the full year, shipments in the country rose by nearly 6 percent, with Apple taking a slightly less generous, but still leading share of 46.5%. From IDC:
In addition, for the full year of 2020, shipments increased by 5.9% from the previous year to 33,633 thousand units. Among the top five companies by vendor, Apple is the top with 15.637 million units (46.5% share), Sharp with 4.474 million units (13.3%), and Fujitsu with 2.794 million units (8.3% share). And 2.711 million (8.1%) Samsung lined up in Thailand (*), and Kyocera ranked fifth with 2.51 million (7.5%). Apple shipments increased 8.3% year-on-year.
IDC says the figure indicate a 2020 recovery on the performance of 2019, however looking ahead, the average selling price of handsets is declining, and that the difficult situation "will continue for vendors with low shipments".
