Apple Won 76% of Japan October Smartphone Sales, Kantar Says - Bloomberg

Apple Inc. (AAPL) sold three of every four smartphones in Japan last month after the country’s largest carrier, NTT Docomo Inc. (9437), began carrying the iPhone, according to a market researcher.

Apple, which released new iPhone 5S and 5C models in September, won 76 percent of Japanese smartphone sales last month, market researcher Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said yesterday.

Apple’s share of smartphone sales at NTT Docomo was 61 percent after it began offering the iPhone for the first time, Kantar said in a post on its Twitter account, confirmed yesterday by Dominic Sunnebo, an analyst with the company in London.

Japan’s three wireless carriers all sell iPhones after NTT Docomo, the nation’s largest, ended its holdout against Apple’s handset as it attempts to regain market share from smaller rivals which already stock the devices. NTT Docomo had 45.7 percent of Japanese mobile subscribers in October compared with 29 percent for KDDI Corp. (9433) and 25.3 percent for SoftBank Corp. (9984), according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

NTT Docomo had resisted offering the iPhone to focus on handsets from Sony Corp. (6758) and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and protect its online store, called dmarket, from competition with Apple’s iTunes.

Shares of NTT Docomo rose 0.5 percent to 1,640 yen as of 10:34 a.m. in Tokyo. SoftBank fell 1.4 percent to 8,310 yen and KDDI dropped 1.5 percent to 6,460 yen. The Topix index declined 0.2 percent.

“It is true that iPhone sold well,” Jun Ootori, a spokesman for NTT Docomo in Tokyo said yesterday. He declined to comment further because the company doesn’t know details of Kantar’s research.

Apple introduced two new iPhones, including a cheaper version in bright colors and an updated high-end device that NTT Docomo began selling in Japan on Sept. 20.

To contact the reporters on this story: Grace Huang in Tokyo at xhuang66@bloomberg.net; Takashi Amano in Tokyo at tamano6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net

The first customer who purchased the Apple Inc. iPhone 5S at the company's store poses for a photograph in the Ginza district of Tokyo, Japan. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg

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