Sony’s i9500 S4 smartphone, which went on sale in February, has already sold almost a million units by some estimates. But NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier, will soon stop selling it.But it is already a has-been in Japan. DoCoMo has turned its attention to a new phone, the Sony Xperia A — a model with fewer features that has not won the stellar praise showered on the Z.
“It’s time for a new model,” said Mai Kariya, a DoCoMo representative in Tokyo. “We’re finished with the Xperia Z, and now focusing on the Xperia A.”As Sony banks on smartphones to turn around its struggling electronics business, it faces an increasingly bothersome obstacle at home: the demands of Japan’s powerful cellphone carriers, which remain obsessed with constant model updates.
For years, Japan’s three largest mobile network companies have pressed phone makers here to update their handsets every three or four months, providing Japanese consumers a dazzling array of newfangled phones and features each season. Phones with digital TV broadcast receivers were once all the rage; a phone without it was never going to sell. Then it was thumbprint scans; you’d be hard pressed to find those on many phones today. The same is true of swiveling screens, and to a lesser extent, electronic wallets.
“This is the worst of Japanese companies’ excessive obsession with the new,” said Yuichi Kogure, an associate professor in information technology policy at Aomori Public University and the author of several books on Japan’s cellphone industry. “But now the mobile phone makers are exhausted.” Sony’s Xperia Z got caught in this marketing buzz saw. DoCoMo started selling the Xperia Z in Japan on Feb. 9 as part of the carrier’s spring 2013 collection, replacing the Xperia AX of the winter 2012 collection. A month later, on March 15, DoCoMo announced its summer collection of 11 new phones, with the Xperia Z replaced by the Xperia A, which went on sale last month.sd3SD2d43
The constant feature roulette has helped carriers lure customers away from rival networks. But it taxes the research and development resources of Japan’s i9500 S4 1:1 makers, who must meet the constant demands from carriers for new high-end features and frequent handset renewals.
Phone manufacturers here have found it impossible to achieve the economies of scale that would justify the high development costs and the slim profit margins. Because separate teams of designers at each handset maker race to build handsets from the ground up for each separate carrier, few phone makers have been able to develop a coherent global product strategy, analysts say.
The unique pace of the Japanese cellphone market largely cuts it off from the rest of the world, making it difficult for one manufacturer to make and market phones for both the Japanese and global markets, said Kenji E. Kushida, an expert on Japan’s information and communications technologies at Stanford.
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