Japan in Numbers

Japan Inc set M&A record in 2011

2012-01-28T11:13:00.000+09:00

The extraordinarly strong yen - it has appreciated by 45% against the dollar in past four years - sent Japanese companies on a shopping spree abroad. With a cash pile of JPY60 trillion big listed companies are sitting on, it's no wonder corporate Japan spent a record $80 billion on some 620 foreign companies in 2011, exceeding the previous record of 466 acquisitions worth of $75 billion in 2008, according to Dealogic. The Economist's article sees this as not a sign of strength but weakness. The situation it argues is different from the Japan's corporate shopping spree in 1980s when the businesses in Japan were growing. Nowadays, a combination of Japan economy being sluggish, including March 11 earthquake and tsunami disaster, floods in Thailand, corporate-governance scandals, ageing population, lacklustre consumption and thanks to crises elsewhere makes Japan Inc seek opportunities abroad, especially in fast-growing emerging markets. Source: The Economist | Japanese firms shop abroad: Armed with a strong yen http://econ.st/sy4CjY

Social gaming market in Japan saw 80% growth to $3.2bn in 2011

2012-01-24T17:47:00.000+09:00

Yano Research estimates the size of Japanese social gaming market hitting 257 billion Japanese yen or about $3.2 billion in 2011, an increase of more than 80% from last year. In 2012 the market is expected to grow by 33% to 342 billion Japanese yen.

Source: Yano

Number of foreign nationals visiting Japan in 2011 dropped by 28% reaching 6.2 million

2012-01-24T15:03:00.000+09:00

Statistics by top countries can be seen in table below:

Source: BizMakoto

The Top 20 Debtor Countries: and the first place goes to Japan

2012-01-20T15:20:00.000+09:00

via

In Japan Facebook goes from niche to mass market adoption in one year

2011-09-30T11:30:00.000+09:00

Facebook seems to break away from a niche social network for foreigners and English-speaking Japanese users to a mass market contender. Recent numbers from Net Ratings, a Nielsen Web metrics company, show that more than 10 million users accessed Facebook from PC in August this year, marking a 5.6 times increase from the last year. The Facebook reach among PC users in Japan now accounts for 17%. In comparison, Facebook is still behind Twitter (23.6%) and Mixi (23.5%) in terms of PC reach. To be honest, the PC reach metrics may not be very indicative in the country like Japan, where the majority of users access Twitter and Mixi like services from mobile phones. For the full picture, we need to know the number of Facebook mobile users. So far, Net Ratings shared just one bit of info - 20% of Facebook users in Japan access the service from smartphones only. So, my estimate is that there are about 13 million users accessing Facebook at least once a month in Japan.

IDC Japan: mobile phone shipments 15% down in 2Q, smartphones now account for 45.5% of all units

2011-09-28T12:03:00.000+09:00

IDC Japan released Japan mobile phone market stats for 2Q11:

8.22 million units were shipped.
Mobile phone shipments were down 15% YoY, the first negative growth period in a seven quarter history.
Smartphones accounted for 45.5% of all shipments
Android smartphone shipments grew by six times to 2.74 million units, followed by iPhone, which shipments also increased twice the size, hitting 990K units.
Sharp held top share with 24.7%, followed by Fujitsu-Toshiba (19.1%), Apple (12.1%), Kyocera (10%), and Sony Ericsson (9.5%).

'Zynga of Japan' KLab goes public on Tokyo Exchange

2011-09-28T10:13:00.000+09:00

Japan-based Klab, initially a provider of large-scale system integration services and recently a social game and mobile content developer, went public yesterday on Tokyo Exchange Mothers section, a market for high-growth and emerging stocks. The IPO debut was successful, with share price jumping from initial 1,700 yen up to 4,070 yen at one point of the trading. However, today KLab's stock is experiencing a sell-out, loosing, as I write, 450 yen or more than 11%. Currently it trades at 3,460 yen. It will be interesting to see KLab's progress after the initial volatile period of stock price adjustment.

I should give a credit to @Jason for the initial 'Zynga of Japan' gem.

Amazon Japan to open a customer support center in Sendai, creates 1,000 jobs

2011-09-28T08:59:00.000+09:00

CNet reports that Amazon Japan will open a customer call center in Sendai, Japan. Amazon Japan's plan to open a customer support center in Sendai employing up to 1,000 locals will surely help the disaster stricken region of the North East region of Japan. The opening will happen in March 2012, marking exactly one year after the biggest earthquake and tsunami hit the North East of Japan.

DoCoMo makes 28.4m euro cash infusion in net mobile, gets serious about mobile payment play in Europe

2011-09-26T11:02:00.001+09:00

Based in Germany, Net mobile AG, a DoCoMo's wholly-owned mobile services developer, received 28.4 million Euro from mother company to do some strategic shopping around. To be exact, the money will be used to "acquire a controlling stake in Bankverein Werther, a private German bank with strong electronic commerce and payment services." Apparently, Bankverein's banking and credit card business licenses are the aim of DoCoMo, who wants to get a stronghold in Germany for its mobile payment service offering. DoCoMo did the similar move in Japan when they entered the mobile payment market several years ago.

Softbank to say good-bye to exclusive iPhone distribution rights in Japan

2011-09-22T10:20:00.000+09:00

Last night Nikkei had some big news to share: KDDI au will start selling iPhone 5 starting this November ending Softbank's iPhone distribution hegemony in Japan. Apple is once again about to reshape the Japan mobile phone market. The following two things are going to happen.

Softbank to feel the pressure
It's hard to underestimate the importance of iPhone exclusive rights for Softbank. According to Gartner estimates, the company sold 7.5 million iPhones in three years. Nikkei says that half of Softbank's monthly 200K-300K new adds goes to iPhone contracts. Moreover, the replacement phone upgrades' substantial share is also attributed to iPhone. By estimates, new and replacement sales combined, Softbank sells about 300K iPhones for Apple every month. Mainly thanks to iPhone, Softbank was able to significantly narrow the gap from KDDI au, being just 3 million shy (Softbank's 30.7m vs. KDDI au's 33.5m user base). It was a matter of time for Softbank to overpass KDDI an and become the second largest operator in Japan. Now it's going to change. First of all, KDDI au got a super retention tool to keep subscribers from fleeing the carrier. Second, along with improving the churn rate, KDDI au is getting ready to welcome new subs and iPhone refugees from Softbank, who are going to abandon the company dissatisfied with its well-known weakness point - lagging behind other carriers in 3G network coverage. Besides Softbank, NTT DoCoMo is also going to be under pressure to keep some of its users from fleeing to KDDI au.

Other handset vendors to feel the pressure
Handset makers, especially the domestic ones, are going to lose again. Apple is going to eat into their shares, squeezing the smaller guys out. It happened with Softbank and now it's going to happen with KDDI au as well. They say that when Apple signs a distribution agreement with a carrier, the company wants iPhone to account for about 20% of operator's inside hardware sales. Nikkei calculates that KDDI au will have to sell two or three million iPhones annually to meet this metric. These two-three million iPhone units are lost business for other handset manufacturers. Moreover, to sell more iPhones carriers put other handset vendors in disadvantage by subsidizing iPhone hardware and sticking to it a cheaper unlimited data monthly plan. That was the case with Softbank whose iPhone monthly plan was roughly one thousand yen cheaper than for other devices. It's expected that KDDI au will employ the similar strategy. All these factors will make other vendor suffer big time.

Are there any winners?
Apple is, of course the big winner here, along with KDDI au who is hopeful to fend off Softbank's onslaught. But also, consumers are going to benefit from more choices and better service quality option in case of KDDI au.

Japan social network mixi buys out Naked Technologies

2011-09-21T16:18:00.000+09:00

Mixi has just acquired through stock buyout Tokyo-based Naked Technologies, a developer of cloud-based mobile application management framework Colors.

Japan ANA orders 6,000 iPads from Softbank

2011-09-21T10:52:00.001+09:00

Marking Softbank's big enterprise win, ANA plans to equip its flight attendants with iPads. The era of digitization comes to the airline industry and ANA is one of the first air companies to switch from paper manuals to digital format. Aiming to increase service quality, ANA will provide its all flight attendant staff with Apple iPads by April 2012. Softbank will also provide cloud and security support for ANA.

I've just changed my blog's title

2011-09-20T11:22:00.000+09:00

I honestly think that the Japan's Cellphone Edge blog title has outdated some time ago and it's time to come up with a new name. First of all, cellphone sounds ancient, given the growth of smartphone market. Second, my interests go beyond the niche focus on mobile handset business and now include Web, content business, mobile applications, social media, startups, and entrepreneurial topics. Thus, the new name is going to be Japan in Numbers.

Primary, this blog will serve as a place to bookmark and take notes of all kinds of metrics related to Japan topics I am interested in. If you need some fresh numbers about Japan, stay tuned!

Anime is a 229 billion yen market in Japan

2011-09-20T10:41:00.001+09:00

Animated cartoon market in Japan enjoys growth second year in a row, according to research by MDRI. In 2010, it went up by 5.8%, hitting 229 billion Japanese yen. To be clear, this big number includes not only sales of Japanese "otaku" anime but also the box office receipts for Western animated films like Toy Story 3 and such.

Comparison of Japan's GREE and DeNA strategies in entering China market

2011-07-26T13:58:00.000+09:00

With a lot of news coming almost every week from Japan's GREE and DeNA social networks, I felt an urge to summarize some bits of information in regard to their expansion to China in order to make a clear picture of what's going on. The result is in a few slides embedded below. Please feel free to let me know of some possible misses or inaccurate facts, if any. Enjoy!

China Social Gaming Market Entry: Japan's GREE and DeNA Comparison

View more presentations from Alexei Poliakov.

Cookpad quarterly results: 10 million user base brings more profits

2011-06-15T10:17:00.000+09:00

Cookpad, Japan's leading online recipe website had just a great quarter, registering healthy increases in revenue, profits and user additions. I wrote recently about Rakuten playing a catch-up game with Cookpad but with such strong results Cookpad has a lot of confidence to fend off competition:

47.8% - revenue increase YoY (JPY3.2bn = over $40m)
52.8% - net operating profit increase YoY (JPY1.6bn = over $20m)
10.2 million - Cookpad current user base (14.6% increase from last year)
970K - number of recipes available
2 million - iPhone apps downloaded to date

DeNa's branching out in user-generated content bears fruit

2011-06-14T22:05:00.001+09:00

Last June, DeNa, an operator of Japan social gaming network Mobage and NTT DoCoMo created a joint venture called Everystar to develop a mobile phone site with a freemium business model where users can upload and share their e-novels, comics, photos and other user-generated content. The venture proved to be a success, according to the metrics released by the companies:

10 million - number of unique users who accessed Everystar since launch
1 million - number of paying users
10% - conversion rate from free to paying customers
210 yen - monthly subscriber fee paid by members
210 million yen ($2.6m) - monthly subscriber revenues
360K - number of Android apps downloaded since November 2010
1.6 million - number of digital items uploaded by users

via GameBiz

NetFront becomes default browser for Mercedes-Benz

2011-06-14T21:34:00.001+09:00

A couple of weeks ago, Access made headlines reporting a significant drop in feature phone shipments and finishing the recent quarter in red. The question left was what Access' options are in the light of crumbling feature phone sales and increasing popularity of smartphones, which run on open platforms, making it possible for users to download any compatible browser.

The plausible answer came in today's press release from Access, which made clear one of the directions the company is making - expand browser business into digital TVs, set-top boxes, mobile handhelds, game consoles, automobile infotainment systems and many other types of products.

This time Daimler and Access decided to integrate NetFront browser into Mercedes-Benz COMAND (Cockpit Management and Data) APS multimedia system. Available in Mercedes-Benz C-Class and SLK-Class cars worldwide, the NetFront browser will provide drivers with Internet access optimized for the while on-the-road experience, including rapid loading, ease-of-use, presentation of relevant weather and Google Maps information, and Adobe Flash support.

via Access

Apple makes it into top three handset makers in Japan but Android sales overshadow its success

2011-06-09T23:26:00.002+09:00

Japan Mobile Handset Shipments: Feature vs. Smart phones
Source: IDC Japan, 1Q2011

IDC Japan reported today the mobile handset shipments results for 1Q2011. Overall, Japan's mobile phone market enjoyed a 1.6% increase in 1Q2011 in comparison with last year, shipping 8,660,000 units in total. The positive dynamic was mainly fueled by market's increased interest in smartphones, which accounted for 45% of total shipments in 1Q2011.

Japan Mobile Handset Market Shares by Vendor
Source: IDC Japan, 1Q2011

Market leader for the last twenty quarters Sharp kept its top position with 23% of market share but was narrowly followed by Fujitsu/Toshiba with 21.5%. One notable thing is that the third position was captured by Apple who shipped 987K iPhones, resulting in 11.4% market share.

Japan Smartphone Market Shares by OS
Source: IDC Japan, 1Q2011

In terms of smartphone OS market shares, the mass introduction of Android handsets by all major carriers has resulted in Android's 75% market share, leaving Apple's iPhone, which is shipped only by Softbank with 25%. The dominance of two smartphone platforms in Japan is striking. If IDC Japan's numbers are correct then other smartphone platforms, most likely Windows shipped only about 1.1K units in 1Q2011.

via IDC Japan

Japan handset makers being squeezed out of domestic market, giving up 30% market share to foreign players

2011-06-08T09:43:00.000+09:00

Domestic vs. foreign handset maker market shares, Japan 2010
Note: Sony Ericsson counted as foreign maker; Source: Seed Planning

Japanese mobile phone manufacturers are definitely feeling the pressure from abroad vendors. Ambushed by the accelerating shift from feature phones to smartphones they ceded 33% of their home turf market to the control of the likes of Apple, Samsung and HTC in 2010. In a very short period of time, probably several months, smartphones tripled is sales year-over-year to account for 40% of new mobile handset shipments in Japan, resulting in 7.7 million units shipped in 2010.

Feature phone vs. smartphone shipments, Japan 2010
Source: Seed Planning

Riding the smartphone wave are foreign handset vendors who beat local players on fulfillment speed and unit price. According to Seed Planning forecast, smartphones will command a 48% market share in 2016, followed by feature phones (40%), and data cards/dongles (12%). Will Japanese makers be able to win back their market share or lose more by that time?

Japan Twitter May report: Feature phones still contribute most to Twitter traffic with 27% share

2011-06-07T10:35:00.000+09:00

Twitter traffic grows 10% in May hitting 726m
Typo: should be 5/2011 not 5/2010

Twitter traffic in Japan grew 10% in May compared with previous month, according to newly released numbers by Biglobe. In total, Biglobe accounted for 726, 470,000 tweets originated in Japan in the month of May.

Twitter traffic shares by device type, May 2011

By device breakdown, feature phone was the device choice for sending 27% of all tweet in May, followed by PC with 24.4% share. Smartphones fared quite well too, passing the 20% mark for the first time. The rest of the traffic was coming from API calls and affiliated services.

Biglobe numbers also revealed very interesting facts about Twitter unique usage patterns in Japan, as followed below. Did you know that:

Sunday is the most tweeted day in a week, followed by Saturday?
The least tweeted day is not Monday but Wednesday?
The most tweeted hour in a day is 11pm?
Twitter traffic wakes up at 7am, spikes a bit during lunch time, starts growing at 7pm, peaks at 11pm, and slows down at 2am?

via Biglobe

Forecast: 5.5 million enterprise smartphone users in Japan in 2015

2011-06-06T06:00:00.006+09:00

IDC Japan: enterprise mobile device shares in 2010

Recent research findings from IDC show that 2010 was the last peak year for feature mobile phones to penetrate the enterprise ranks in Japan, hitting the all highs of 12.12 million accounts. However, from this year on the feature phones will gradually decrease in numbers giving the way to trendy smartphones. According to IDC Japan, the enterprise smartphone user numbers are to double in 2011 to 1.34 million from 650K users in 2010. In 2015, the smartphone accounts are forecasted to reach 5.54 million versus about 10 million feature phones.

IDC Japan: smartphones start replacing feature phone in enterprise

IDC also reports that there were over one million of enterprise data card users and some 3G/WiFi router and media tablet (iPod?) business users in very low numbers.

IDC also noted that the earthquake disaster that hit Japan in March was a catalyst for companies to speed up the adoption of mobile PCs after realizing the importance of mobile workforce in disaster-hit areas. IDC forecasts the number of business mobility PC users to grow from 4.54 million in 2010 to 5 million this year (not shown in the charts in this post). In 2015, they will account for 6.75 million.

via IDC Japan (PDF in Japanese)

NTT DoCoMo opens official page on Facebook

2011-06-03T18:12:00.000+09:00

NTT DoCoMo recognizes Facebook importance and opens its official page on the social network site. So far, more than three thousands people signed up or liked DoCoMo's page. What's interesting is that DoCoMo has a smartphone review page where they list DoCoMo's recent models (just photos, no reviews currently) and where users can leave comments! It's a brave move to let users comment on each model and will be a good indicator for choosing a good model. I am very curious to know how they will deal with negative comments?

How Gree's addressable market grew from 25 to 800 million users

2011-06-03T17:05:00.000+09:00

According to Gree management, 800 million users are potential audience for apps released through Gree platform. In this case, domestic user base still stands at about 25 million, while the rest comes from Gree's M&A and partnerships deals.

via Gree's sources

How gamification of Rakuten Recipe site helped gather 170K recipes

2011-06-03T14:32:00.000+09:00

Number of available recipes on CookPad (870K) and Rakuten (170K)

If you watched Japanese TV for a while you would understand that cooking is extremely popular in Japan, thanks first of all to the army of housewives. That's why recipe companies like CookPad go IPO and enjoy whopping page views. And that's why Japan's Internet behemoth Rakuten couldn't yield the temptation of launching CookPad's competitor Rakuten Recipes in October last year.

Rakuten understood that in order to catch up with CookPad who had a head-start from 1997 they need to employ some innovative strategy. Both sites rely on their users to submit and share recipes with others. So, Rakuten's strategy was to add gamification element to their site to engage and reward users with Rakuten points. Every time someone uploads a recipe, she gets points. If the uploaded recipe gains popularity the user who uploaded it gets additional points. Rakuten also invites food brands to have promotional contests. For example, a sake producer advertised on Rakuten Recipes may start campaigning for user-submitted recipes that will use this sake in cooking. The best recipes will be selected through user voting and rewarded with more points.

Thanks to these play mechanics, Rakuten Recipes is off to a good start to have aggregated 170K recipes. This number is still shy compared to CookPad's 870K recipes but CookPad got a serious competition watching their back. There is also Yahoo! Japan Gourmet Recipes site that is relatively popular in Japan but I don't have their numbers to post here. If you're in Japan, which site do you or a loved one use?

via gamebiz.jp/ nikkei sangyo shinbun