Apple Inc’s iPhone shipments to Japan more than doubled in the past year, capturing 72 percent of the country’s smartphone market, a research firm said.
Shipments of the iPhone, which began selling in Japan in July 2008, climbed to 1.69 million units in the year ended March 31, Tokyo-based MM Research Institute Ltd said in a report on Thursday. That raised the total to 2.3 million, Hideaki Yokota, an analyst at the research firm, said by telephone yesterday.
The iPhone helped smartphone sales more than double last fiscal year in Japan as shipments of regular mobile phones shrank, the report said. Smartphone shipments will probably exceed 3 million units in the 12 months started April 1, even as the overall market is forecast to contract for a third year, it said.
“Last year was just the beginning of the smartphone competition, which is why Apple did so well,” said analyst Calvin Huang (黃文堯) at Daiwa Securities Group Inc in Taipei. “This year will be much more competitive.”
Taiwan’s HTC Corp (宏達電) was the second-largest seller of smartphones in Japan with 11 percent of the market, followed by Toshiba Corp’s 6.8 percent, the research firm said. The MM Research Institute estimates indicate Japan accounted for about 5.6 percent of iPhones sold worldwide last fiscal year.
Separately, Gizmodo.com, the blog that paid US$5,000 for an Apple Inc iPhone prototype after a company engineer left it in a bar, isn’t alone in trying to generate publicity from the incident.
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Europe’s second-biggest airline, offered the software engineer, identified by Gizmodo as 27-year-old Gray Powell, a free business-class flight to Munich, where he could indulge his “passion” for German beer.
“We all know how frustrating it can be to lose personal belongings, especially when it is such a unique item,” Nicola Lange, Lufthansa’s director of marketing and customer relations in the Americas, wrote in an open letter to Powell. “We thought you could use a break soon.”
Powell left the iPhone behind at the Gourmet Haus Staudt, a beer hall in Redwood City, California, on March 18 after celebrating his birthday.
Gizmodo returned the prototype to Apple on Monday after receiving a letter from the company’s general counsel requesting it back.
Martin Riecken, a US spokesman for the airline, said on Thursday that the company had not yet heard from the engineer.
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