Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global

先端行き過ぎた日本の攜帯端末、その「おごり」が海外進出失敗の原因か―米紙

2009年7月20日、米紙・ニューヨークタイムズによると、日本制の攜帯電話端末は世界の何年も先を行きながら、自國の攜帯市場の需要に目を向け過ぎたために、海外進出における競爭力が育たなかったという。

日本の攜帯端末はインターネット、メールができるのはもちろん、クレジットカードや搭乗券にもなり、體脂肪計測機能まで付いている。しかし、海外ではパナソニック、シャープ、NECなどの日本制攜帯端末はほとんど見かけない。日本企業で唯一、海外で成功しているのはスウェーデンのエリクソン社とのジョイントベンチャーのソニーエリクソンだけだが、それでも09年の第1四半期のシェアは6．3％に過ぎず、ノキアやサムソンなどに大きく遅れをとっているという。

これは日本の攜帯端末が時代の先を行き過ぎて世界で受け入れられなかったことや、iモードなど日本國內に特化した通信規格の開発に傾き過ぎたことが原因だと同紙は分析している。また、01年ごろから日本市場の需要が日ごとに増大し始め、各社がその対応に追われて海外進出の努力を怠ったことも大きく影響しているという。不況で國內需要が大幅に減少する中、「日本は今、海外進出しなければ死を待つしかない」と業界関系者は警告している。
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紐約時報：日本手機為何困于國內

加拉帕戈斯綜合癥

乍一看，日本手機應該是手機發燒友們的理想選擇：集合了移動互聯網、E-mail，可作信用卡、登機牌，甚至可以當體脂計算器用。

但是你很難在芝加哥或是倫敦的街頭，看到有人使用諸如松下、夏普或者NEC等日本品牌的手機。盡管日本手機廠商在國外市場已辛勤耕耘多年，但遺憾的是依然收獲廖廖。

日本東京的市場咨詢公司Eurotechnology 總裁Gerhard Fasol表示，日本多年以來在創新方面處于領先地位，但卻沒有從中獲得相應的商業利潤。

日本手機的這種情況可以用個專門的詞“加拉帕戈斯綜合癥”來形容下。（注：加拉帕戈斯是一個地理位置獨特、物產豐富但長期以來與世隔絕的群島。在此形容日本手機創新獨到，但商業推廣不利。）

日本慶應義塾大學講師Takeshi Natsuno也對此進行了解釋，他說，日本手機就像達爾文筆下的加拉帕戈斯群島上的特有生物一樣，美艷絕倫、卻深藏閨中不為人知。

作為成功推出i-Mode 的幕后推手，今年Natsuno先生建議稱，應該征集如何將日本手機推向全球的好的想法。

Natsuno表示：“讓每一位普通用戶都擁有一部超炫的手機，那么我們就得自問，日本能不能有效地利用這種優勢？”

唯一一家真正走向全球的手機廠商只有索尼愛立信，但這家廠商只是日本電子商與瑞典電信公司的合資企業，而且總部還在倫敦。

索尼愛立信也因巨大虧損遭受巨創，2009年第一個季度的市場份額還只有6.3%，落后于芬蘭的諾基亞，韓國三星、LG以及美國摩托羅拉。

然而，與日本手機這點可憐的全球影響力相比，日本手機行業的創新延伸卻觸角頗廣：1999年加入e-mail功能，2000年推出數碼相機功能的手機，2001年3G手機問世，2002年音樂下載手機登場，2004年手機電子支付開始應用，2005年數字電視手機盛行。

日本目前已有1億個3G智能手機用戶，與美國這個用戶基數更大的市場相比，3G用戶超過其兩倍。很多日本用戶通過手機，而不是電腦來使用互聯網。

確實，日本手機廠商已經在這個數字時代處于主宰地位。不過，他們有點聰明過頭了。從20世紀90年代開始，手機廠商們就被囿于國內市場了，當時日本出臺了獨立自主的2G標準，這一標準被海外市場置之不理。運營商建設了柵欄式的互聯網服務，如i-Mode。這個互聯網應用培養了日本龐大的電子商務和內容市場，但也因此慢慢將日本與全球市場孤立起來。

2001年，日本先行一步采取了3G技術，這個時候，日本之外的其他市場還在觀望中，這樣就進一步使日本手機遠遠拋開了海外的絕大多數市場。

之后，90年代末，日本手機得到了快速發展。2000年初，日本手機廠商開始試探性關注海外市場。不過這時候的市場份額已是顯著縮水，當然部分原因也在于當時的經濟不景氣和人口老齡化問題顯現。2008年的手機出貨量僅占總份額的19％，預計2009會更少。行業格局已基本圈定，全球八大廠商競爭這一市場。

日本部分手機廠商目前已經考慮推進海外市場的發展，其中包括在2006年因為海外市場推廣失敗而退出的NEC。同時松下、夏普、東芝和富士通都表示計劃拓展海外市場。

市場咨詢公司Gartner日本公司副總裁Kenshi Tazaki認為，日本手機廠商需要海外市場，不然他們的業務也就走到盡頭了。

最近，Natsuno召集了21名業內分析人士在東京市中心的一座摩天大樓里召開會議。他們在會上分析了市場數據，期間充滿斥責，與會人員也不時搖頭。

日本手機存在的問題

本次會議還就日本手機本身的問題進行了探討。一些參會者表示，雖然日本手機硬件先進，但界面非常原始，多數手機無法像iPhone等其他國外智能手機一樣，和PC實現數據同步傳輸。

軟銀移動高級執行副總裁Tetsuzo Matsumoto認為，因為每款手機都設計成用戶定制頁面，因此手機研發相當耗時而且成本高昂，這樣，日本的手機就像是手工作坊出來的一樣，發展非常受限。

另外日本手機市場也有一些獨特之處，比如說翻蓋手機盛行，但這種款式在海外市場卻不太受待見。再有近期的太陽能和防水功能手機，雖然在硬件上有所創新，但并未取得突破性進展。

還有，由于過份追求硬件，使得新款手機都看起來厚重笨拙。有分析師認為，手機廠商對硬件等外圍設備的太多關注已經阻礙了手機的創新。

比如夏普為軟銀定制的912SH，居然集成了可90度旋轉的液晶屏、GPS導航、條形碼掃描器、數字電視、信用卡功能、視頻會議以及可以通過面部識別解鎖手機的攝像頭多種功能。

日本手機研發者對蘋果iPhone和應用商店的全球盛行艷羨不已，iPhone不僅將美國和歐洲的手機行業從硬件的束縛中解放出來，同時還引導了手機軟件應用的熱潮。Natsuno把玩著他買的iPhone 3G手機嘆道：“這個才是我想做的手機”。

日本手機在硬件上的先進，同時軟件方面又相當原始，這種差異使得日本同行很困惑iPhone的成功，這到底是時尚前沿還是無聊之作？一名分析師表示，日本用戶只是不習慣將手機和電腦相聯。

Natsuno牽頭的這次會議指出了解決“加拉帕戈斯綜合癥”的方向：日本手機廠商需要更多地關注軟件，聘用海外相關人才，同時更應該把眼光放遠、關注海外市場。

巴克萊資本日本通信行業分析師Tetsuro Tsusaka說：“日本手機行業現在關注海外還不算太晚，加拉帕戈斯群島外大多數的手機還相當落后”．

日本手機廠商想要拓展市場，但他們的聰明才智卻沒用到點子上
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Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global

Japanese cellphone makers want to expand, but their clever handsets do not work on other networks.

By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: July 19, 2009

TOKYO — At first glance, Japanese cellphones are a gadget lover’s dream: ready for Internet and e-mail, they double as credit cards, boarding passes and even body-fat calculators.


Competition is fierce in the relatively small Japanese cellphone market, with eight manufacturers.

Takeshi Natsuno developed a wireless Internet service that caught on in Japan.

But it is hard to find anyone in Chicago or London using a Japanese phone like a Panasonic, a Sharp or an NEC. Despite years of dabbling in overseas markets, Japan’s handset makers have little presence beyond the country’s shores.

“Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it,” said Gerhard Fasol, president of the Tokyo-based IT consulting firm, Eurotechnology Japan.

The Japanese have a name for their problem: Galápagos syndrome.

Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University.

This year, Mr. Natsuno, who developed a popular wireless Internet service called i-Mode, assembled some of the best minds in the field to debate how Japanese cellphones can go global.

“The most amazing thing about Japan is that even the average person out there will have a superadvanced phone,” said Mr. Natsuno. “So we’re asking, can’t Japan build on that advantage?”

The only Japanese handset maker with any meaningful global share is Sony Ericsson, and that company is a London-based joint venture between a Japanese electronics maker and a Swedish telecommunications firm.

And Sony Ericsson has been hit by big losses. Its market share was just 6.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009, behind Nokia of Finland, Samsung Electronics and LG of South Korea, and Motorola of Illinois.

Yet Japan’s lack of global clout is all the more surprising because its cellphones set the pace in almost every industry innovation: e-mail capabilities in 1999, camera phones in 2000, third-generation networks in 2001, full music downloads in 2002, electronic payments in 2004 and digital TV in 2005.

Japan has 100 million users of advanced third-generation smartphones, twice the number used in the United States, a much larger market. Many Japanese rely on their phones, not a PC, for Internet access.

Indeed, Japanese makers thought they had positioned themselves to dominate the age of digital data. But Japanese cellphone makers were a little too clever. The industry turned increasingly inward. In the 1990s, they set a standard for the second-generation network that was rejected everywhere else. Carriers created fenced-in Web services, like i-Mode. Those mobile Web universes fostered huge e-commerce and content markets within Japan, but they have also increased the country’s isolation from the global market.

Then Japan quickly adopted a third-generation standard in 2001. The rest of the world dallied, essentially making Japanese phones too advanced for most markets.

At the same time, the rapid growth of Japan’s cellphone market in the late 1990s and early 2000s gave Japanese companies little incentive to market overseas. But now the market is shrinking significantly, hit by a recession and a graying economy; makers shipped 19 percent fewer handsets in 2008 and expect to ship even fewer in 2009. The industry remains fragmented, with eight cellphone makers vying for part of a market that will be less than 30 million units this year.

Several Japanese companies are now considering a push into overseas markets, including NEC, which pulled the plug on its money-losing international cellphone efforts in 2006. Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba and Fujitsu are said to be planning similar moves.

“Japanese cellphone makers need to either look overseas, or exit the business,” said Kenshi Tazaki, a managing vice president at the consulting firm Gartner Japan.

At a recent meeting of Mr. Natsuno’s group, 20 men and one woman crowded around a big conference table in a skyscraper in central Tokyo, examining market data, delivering diatribes and frequently shaking their heads.

The discussion then turned to the cellphones themselves. Despite their advanced hardware, handsets here often have primitive, clunky interfaces, some participants said. Most handsets have no way to easily synchronize data with PCs as the iPhone and other smartphones do.

Because each handset model is designed with a customized user interface, development is time-consuming and expensive, said Tetsuzo Matsumoto, senior executive vice president at Softbank Mobile, a leading carrier. “Japan’s phones are all ‘handmade’ from scratch,” he said. “That’s reaching the limit.”

Then there are the peculiarities of the Japanese market, like the almost universal clamshell design, which is not as popular overseas. Recent hardware innovations, like solar-powered batteries or waterproofing, have been incremental rather than groundbreaking.

The emphasis on hardware makes even the newest phones here surprisingly bulky. Some analysts say cellphone carriers stifle innovation by demanding so many peripheral hardware functions for phones.

The Sharp 912SH for Softbank, for example, comes with an LCD screen that swivels 90 degrees, GPS tracking, a bar-code reader, digital TV, credit card functions, video conferencing and a camera and is unlocked by face recognition.

Meanwhile, Japanese developers are jealous of the runaway global popularity of the Apple iPhone and App Store, which have pushed the American and European cellphone industry away from its obsession with hardware specifications to software. “This is the kind of phone I wanted to make,” Mr. Natsuno said, playing with his own iPhone 3G.

The conflict between Japan’s advanced hardware and its primitive software has contributed to some confusion over whether the Japanese find the iPhone cutting edge or boring. One analyst said they just aren’t used to handsets that connect to a computer.

The forum Mr. Natsuno convened to address Galápagos syndrome has come up with a series of recommendations: Japan’s handset makers must focus more on software and must be more aggressive in hiring foreign talent, and the country’s cellphone carriers must also set their sights overseas.

“It’s not too late for Japan’s cellphone industry to look overseas,” said Tetsuro Tsusaka, a telecom analyst at Barclays Capital Japan. “Besides, most phones outside the Galápagos are just so basic.”